8 ms·

Microsoft Retiring Master Certifications And Training

63 points by mkoble11 13y ago

basicallydan 13y ago
I know only one thing about what is actually involved in getting these various certificates, and it's that there are a lot of big, thick books with vague titles. What I do know is that the whole concept of having qualifications which are closely linked to the proprietary technologies of a specific business has always urked me, so I feel like this is probably a positive step for the industry as a whole.
- gaius 13y ago
  Red Hat is in the certification racket too y'know.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  If that misconception is the "only one thing" you know about getting a certification, then why do you feel it appropriate to comment on the process? You don't need to buy the books in order to pass the certification exams. Experience is often far more useful. A list of topics covered by the exam is often provided, too. So somebody with experience can often easily supplement their existing knowledge by reading some online articles or documentation, without ever looking at one of the official books. And one of the core aspects of certifications is that they usually very specifically target a given product or topic. This is one of the things that differentiates them from college degrees and other ways of suggesting qualification. A certification can help an employer gauge a candidate's abilities in a far more specific manner than a Comp. Sci. degree can, for example. Certification may not always have the value or reliability that it's claimed to have, but let's not misrepresent it or its process out of ignorance, either.
  - basicallydan 13y ago
    Fair points, perhaps I was a little rash. The reason I feel urked by the idea is that it seems to me that it would lead to a greater lock-in of technologies and products that a business can use. More investment would need to be made in order to support a technology or product and thus would make it harder to switch to something else if requirements changed. I can see the use of having certifications for hiring as well as credibility to clients, but I feel that there's probably a fair amount of danger in this too. As for the books, that was an off-hand comment, half to illustrate that I am, in fact, not experienced with the world of Microsoft Certifications, and so whatever I say should be taken as comment from a layman :)
sker 13y ago
Note that they are only retiring two types of certifications. There's still a plethora of MCTS certifications. I got one when I was fresh out of college and I have never made use of it. I don't even know what companies look out for these things.
- platz 13y ago
  For many of these certifications, they not as useful to the employee as they are useful for the employer. The more certifications the employer has the better it is for them in various ways; sales opportunities, recognition, bids, perks, etc...
mkoble11 13y ago
The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there's a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program. Some of the thoughts/comments on Twitter towards this decision by Microsoft is based on the move towards the cloud. What are your thoughts, HN? On another note: I respect anyone who's gone through the rigorous MCM process, but my next thoughts have to do more with certification in general. Let's take software development for example. Microsoft has developer based certifications. Is the certification more for HR who doesn't understand how to evaluate someone's github account? It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of the cage. That's why I'm thankful every day for the amazing HN community.
- mhurron 13y ago
  If you are going through the certification paths just for the paper, then yes, you will get nothing out of it except a piece of paper for HR. Decent certification paths cover many things that you might not have used in your github. They can expose you to different parts of the system or API. If you treat it like a learning opportunity, you will learn something new and the certification at the end becomes more incidental.
- corresation 13y ago
  As someone who acquired quite a number of Microsoft certifications over the years (MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, among others, albeit a decade ago), I'll be a voice that speaks in favor of them, and in favor of mechanisms like them. Not as a hiring tool; Not to evaluate talent; Not to prove knowledge of a domain to anyone else: For those goals they are absolutely miserable, and are why they earned such a poor reputation. Instead as a personal target for learning things that you don't necessarily have to learn otherwise, and the truth is that in this industry you can be quite successful even if you're egregiously misusing and misunderstanding the platform that you're building on. If I'm going to be doing a project in Visual Studio, or deploying a database on SQL Server, or using the security services of Windows, it is in my interest to understand the platforms that I'm using, and those certifications provided a personal goal that I could shoot for to achieve those rudiments.
pearjuice 13y ago
> It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of the cage. This so much. I have found the door of the cage years ago yet I jumped in the wheel after a while (started CS) because that is the only thing which will give you a reward at the end of day. Employers should really, really reconsider the value of what you have actually done instead of basing your qualifications on an artificially valued piece of paper.
M4N14C 13y ago
They're going to make you all read the Linux man pages now.
dmourati 13y ago
If MCSE stands for Must Consult Someone Else, what did MCM/MCSM stand for? I kid, I kid.
- BinaryBrainz 13y ago
  Going off of a few other comments in this thread I would hope it stood for Must Consult w/ Me or Microsoft Consults w/ Me. I've heard that Microsoft's tests are some of the hardest in the biz compared to other associated certs at the same level.
bsg75 13y ago
I have never met a good, _experienced_ MS developer or admin who lacked a certification and it negatively affected their ability or image. I have met plenty people who held certifications whom I would not trust on any of my production systems, and where it was apparent their time would have been better spent gaining experience, not test scores. These "Master" certs were time consuming and expensive, no? As they are backed by a sales based entity (as with most IT certifications) if the revenue did not support the program, it gets canned.
- GoodIntentions 13y ago
  I've worked with really good, skilled and really not so skilled people that held Microsoft certs. The folks that were not worth a shit on the job all seemed to list MS certs in their email sigs. Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them.
  - BrentOzar 13y ago
    > Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them. Me too, but that's why folks are up in arms about these cents being discontinued. They were the first credible cents Microsoft ever had, and now MS is saying they're discontinued due to low adoption. MS wanted to see more MCSEs upgrade to an MCM. Well, duh, they can't, because the vast majority of MCSEs don't actually have skills.
BrentOzar 13y ago
I'm a Microsoft Certified Master myself (of SQL Server) so I'll explain a little about what's got everybody up in arms. When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened. Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.) Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.) Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption. The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.) People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Solution architect here who spends a lot of time with Microsoft's stack. I've got absolutely no certifications of any kind and refuse to take part in the certification circus. It serves only to generate an ecosystem rather than to solve problems and costs companies a lot of money. We've thrown our partnership agreement in as it is not valuable for us and the certification management is a pain. We can't get staff with certifications and people don't want them any more anyway and we can't force people to take them. At the end of the day, it's a dying concept. You can't get bummed out about something which was circling the drain years ago. Regarding fit for purpose staff, we've had people with wonderful CV's jammed full of experience and certifications galore but when it comes down to it, a blind monkey would be a better asset when you have you have to diverge slightly from the preprogrammed certification skills.

63 points by mkoble11 13y ago

I know only one thing about what is actually involved in getting these various certificates, and it's that there are a lot of big, thick books with vague titles. What I do know is that the whole concept of having qualifications which are closely linked to the proprietary technologies of a specific business has always urked me, so I feel like this is probably a positive step for the industry as a whole.

gaius 13y ago
Red Hat is in the certification racket too y'know.
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
If that misconception is the "only one thing" you know about getting a certification, then why do you feel it appropriate to comment on the process? You don't need to buy the books in order to pass the certification exams. Experience is often far more useful. A list of topics covered by the exam is often provided, too. So somebody with experience can often easily supplement their existing knowledge by reading some online articles or documentation, without ever looking at one of the official books. And one of the core aspects of certifications is that they usually very specifically target a given product or topic. This is one of the things that differentiates them from college degrees and other ways of suggesting qualification. A certification can help an employer gauge a candidate's abilities in a far more specific manner than a Comp. Sci. degree can, for example. Certification may not always have the value or reliability that it's claimed to have, but let's not misrepresent it or its process out of ignorance, either.
- basicallydan 13y ago
  Fair points, perhaps I was a little rash. The reason I feel urked by the idea is that it seems to me that it would lead to a greater lock-in of technologies and products that a business can use. More investment would need to be made in order to support a technology or product and thus would make it harder to switch to something else if requirements changed. I can see the use of having certifications for hiring as well as credibility to clients, but I feel that there's probably a fair amount of danger in this too. As for the books, that was an off-hand comment, half to illustrate that I am, in fact, not experienced with the world of Microsoft Certifications, and so whatever I say should be taken as comment from a layman :)

sker 13y ago

Note that they are only retiring two types of certifications. There's still a plethora of MCTS certifications. I got one when I was fresh out of college and I have never made use of it. I don't even know what companies look out for these things.

platz 13y ago
For many of these certifications, they not as useful to the employee as they are useful for the employer. The more certifications the employer has the better it is for them in various ways; sales opportunities, recognition, bids, perks, etc...

mkoble11 13y ago

The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there's a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program. Some of the thoughts/comments on Twitter towards this decision by Microsoft is based on the move towards the cloud. What are your thoughts, HN? On another note: I respect anyone who's gone through the rigorous MCM process, but my next thoughts have to do more with certification in general. Let's take software development for example. Microsoft has developer based certifications. Is the certification more for HR who doesn't understand how to evaluate someone's github account? It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of the cage. That's why I'm thankful every day for the amazing HN community.

mhurron 13y ago
If you are going through the certification paths just for the paper, then yes, you will get nothing out of it except a piece of paper for HR. Decent certification paths cover many things that you might not have used in your github. They can expose you to different parts of the system or API. If you treat it like a learning opportunity, you will learn something new and the certification at the end becomes more incidental.
corresation 13y ago
As someone who acquired quite a number of Microsoft certifications over the years (MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, among others, albeit a decade ago), I'll be a voice that speaks in favor of them, and in favor of mechanisms like them. Not as a hiring tool; Not to evaluate talent; Not to prove knowledge of a domain to anyone else: For those goals they are absolutely miserable, and are why they earned such a poor reputation. Instead as a personal target for learning things that you don't necessarily have to learn otherwise, and the truth is that in this industry you can be quite successful even if you're egregiously misusing and misunderstanding the platform that you're building on. If I'm going to be doing a project in Visual Studio, or deploying a database on SQL Server, or using the security services of Windows, it is in my interest to understand the platforms that I'm using, and those certifications provided a personal goal that I could shoot for to achieve those rudiments.

pearjuice 13y ago

> It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of the cage. This so much. I have found the door of the cage years ago yet I jumped in the wheel after a while (started CS) because that is the only thing which will give you a reward at the end of day. Employers should really, really reconsider the value of what you have actually done instead of basing your qualifications on an artificially valued piece of paper.

M4N14C 13y ago

They're going to make you all read the Linux man pages now.

dmourati 13y ago

If MCSE stands for Must Consult Someone Else, what did MCM/MCSM stand for? I kid, I kid.

BinaryBrainz 13y ago
Going off of a few other comments in this thread I would hope it stood for Must Consult w/ Me or Microsoft Consults w/ Me. I've heard that Microsoft's tests are some of the hardest in the biz compared to other associated certs at the same level.

bsg75 13y ago

I have never met a good, _experienced_ MS developer or admin who lacked a certification and it negatively affected their ability or image. I have met plenty people who held certifications whom I would not trust on any of my production systems, and where it was apparent their time would have been better spent gaining experience, not test scores. These "Master" certs were time consuming and expensive, no? As they are backed by a sales based entity (as with most IT certifications) if the revenue did not support the program, it gets canned.

GoodIntentions 13y ago
I've worked with really good, skilled and really not so skilled people that held Microsoft certs. The folks that were not worth a shit on the job all seemed to list MS certs in their email sigs. Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them.
- BrentOzar 13y ago
  > Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them. Me too, but that's why folks are up in arms about these cents being discontinued. They were the first credible cents Microsoft ever had, and now MS is saying they're discontinued due to low adoption. MS wanted to see more MCSEs upgrade to an MCM. Well, duh, they can't, because the vast majority of MCSEs don't actually have skills.

BrentOzar 13y ago

I'm a Microsoft Certified Master myself (of SQL Server) so I'll explain a little about what's got everybody up in arms. When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened. Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.) Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.) Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption. The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.) People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.

harrytuttle 13y ago
Solution architect here who spends a lot of time with Microsoft's stack. I've got absolutely no certifications of any kind and refuse to take part in the certification circus. It serves only to generate an ecosystem rather than to solve problems and costs companies a lot of money. We've thrown our partnership agreement in as it is not valuable for us and the certification management is a pain. We can't get staff with certifications and people don't want them any more anyway and we can't force people to take them. At the end of the day, it's a dying concept. You can't get bummed out about something which was circling the drain years ago. Regarding fit for purpose staff, we've had people with wonderful CV's jammed full of experience and certifications galore but when it comes down to it, a blind monkey would be a better asset when you have you have to diverge slightly from the preprogrammed certification skills.