Open Source Certification , Friend or Foe

Kris Buytaert — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 13:53:34 +0000

With 2 of the bigger Open Source projects I care about talking about certifications programs questions pop up again ...

Should we certify ourselves ?

So let me tell you about my experiences in getting Open Source related Certifications ..

Over a decade ago, (2001) when RedHat was still Redhat and not yet Fedora the company I was working for was about to partner with RedHat and needed to get a number of people certified for that.

So I took the challenge, I bored myselve to death during a 4 day RedHat fast track training and set out to do the exam the next day. Obviosly I scored pretty well given my yearlong experience in the subject. Back then I was told that I scored the one but European Record on the exam which was actually held by another collegue (hey Ico) , our CTO however was not amused when I told that I could have scored better but I didn't bother running a chkconfig smb on since I didn't see the use in using windows fileshares in a unix environment (Yes I was young , we're all allowd to make stupid mistakes :))

So I was certified, we were expecting the requests to flow in en masse ... nothing happened... not a single customer request... If I recall correctly we got 2 requests for certified engineers over the course of the following years. One was from a customer that wanted to have us do some junior level sysadmin work on their systems which we didn't care about, we proposed a more junior profile, but they insisted on having someone who was certified, The other one was from a Large institution that wanted certified people for their RedHat support, only to quickly learn that the budget they had planned for this project was about half the rate we usually charged ..

When RedHat introduced their certified Architect program my answer was, sure .. if you bring us the customer that will make the investment worthwhile , guess what..

My second experience with Open Source certification came a couple of years later with MySQL, same story partnering etc, . only this time our trainer had put some focus on a couple of slides during the training (Hi Tobias) and during the exam indeed one of those questions popped up, The correct answer to "What are the core values of MySQL AB" was "We reply to email" , I stood up and left the exam ...
I ranted about this to a number of people including Roland Bouman who back then was just starting on the MySQL (NDBD) Cluster certifciation track and I assisted him in making the book to study for that exam better.
Once again .. pretty much no one asked for MySQL certification in Europe back in those days (2007 ?)

I won't go deeper into discussing the Xen certification I got from Citrix, but it involved correcting slides from the presenters at the first European training.

Based on my experience with these certifications in Belgium/Europe you can see that I`m not a big fan of certifications I have not seen a reason for me to certify yet

I actually think that noone within the Open Source community should be looking for certification, we should be looking for people that are active in the community and that are contributing to projects.
Unlike in the proprietary world where you have to cough up tons of money in order to get a license to play with a tool and learn itl In the open source world with projects such as both Drupal and Puppet, there are absolutely no excuses for Junior people not to engage and prove themselves. they have full access to anything they need, the only thing they need to do is want to get involved.

Sadly this world however is still full of incompetent recruiters, middlemarket agencies that will never understand this and will ask for cerftifications of some kind. My fear is indeed that there will be a group of mediocre but certified developers swarming these growing markets at dumping rates and that the people with the real experience that have been involved in the communities for ages already will be the ones pulling the short straw.

Anyhow ... in just a short couple of years everything will be fine again .. as by then my RHCE will be current again and the incompetent recruiters that need people that are RedHat 7 certified will start calling me by the dozen.

How to suck at Security

Kris Buytaert — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:05:03 +0000

There is this great post over at sans.org Teaching people how to to suck at Security, (actually a reprint of this post

Especially the remarks about security tools ..
On how not to implement them or how to neglect configuring, afterall the default values must be secure enough.

However My favorite

Hire somebody just because he or she has a lot of certifications.

I'd write Vendor Certifications however .. as independent certifications might have some use.. but if I`m looking for a security guy and he starts talking to me about his product certificatins, something is wrong..

Remember, security is a life style, not product you can buy ..

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - certification

Open Source Certification , Friend or Foe

How to suck at Security