Certifications. Its one of the most highly contested issues in our field. Some people love them, some people hate them, but everyone has passionate theories about their validity.
There seems to be three general groups of people. The first group has just gotten their first or second cert, which is usually a CCNA, MCP, or something from CompTIA. These people have usually been doing IT work for a year or so, look at the most recent salary survey, sees that the average CCNA makes $64,000 a year and thinks, "If I can only pass this one test, then I'll make that much money too!"
For the first couple of certs this is the basic motivation. Sure there may be other reasons, maybe your new job requires a cert, or maybe you just want to add to your signature line, but most of the time, its visions of more money with more certs.
This first group is also the group that gets laughed at the most.
"You don't know that port 25 is SMTP? You're the freakin' Exchange administrator! I guess your MCSE boot camp didn't cover that, ey?"
The second group has a few more years of experience. They realize that a lot of people who make $64,000 a year also happen to have a CCNA. Its not that people who recently pass the CCNA test suddenly get a pay raise.
I belong to this group. And I can say with absolute certainty that I no longer get certifications for money. The only reason I have certs, is to increase the size of my e-mail signature. Two of my certs CISSP and CCNP are just as important to me as Security+. Why? Count the letters. I added 9 characters to my signature with the CISSP and CCNP, and another 9 characters when I got the Security+.
Having a really long e-mail signature makes the first group (the newbies) envious and respectful of your superior intellect. It makes your peers in the second group envious and respectful of your long list of letters. (Have you ever made your certification font size one larger that the rest of your signature?) The third group hates you more and more with each new string of absurd letters. Some of these people have been in the industry for 20, 30, or even 400 years. They think of you as the "script kiddies" of the office. You know one of these people right? They tend to call certifications, "certificates" and they say things like "I may not have my CCNP but I converted 500 routers from RIP to OSPF when IP was still at version 3."
Both the first and second group are envious of these people. Sure, sometimes they accidentally start talking about AppleTalk when you're discussing a sniffer trace. But their overall experience helps them figure things out faster.
These people have never read a salary survey, and they express patriotic support for the help desk technicians going to the latest CCNA boot camp, until someone tells them that it's not the military.
Over the course of 30 years of experience we have gone full circle from certifications being the measure of how smart you are, to being a cool signature, to being "a waste of time that all these kids are doing."
