Certification Fun with Jay Gordon

Matty and Jay Gordon, on the show for the second time since the punk rock episode about a year earlier, have what Matty calls an eavesdroppable Zoom coffee about certifications, hiring, and on-call war stories. Jay works at Microsoft and recently earned an Azure certification. Matty, in Chicago, works at PagerDuty and opens with the line "I used to say that I had a lot of respect for MCSEs until I became one." Jay also hosts the On-Call Nightmares podcast.

Why Jay Took an Exam

Jay needs to speak to an Azure audience credibly, and wanted a new way to learn, so returned to the certifications that Jay used in youth, having come into technology without college or an internship. The exam covered the big picture, like governance, subscriptions and business units within a subscription, and a certification was a check on what Jay did and didn't know. Jay's view: "I like them as a way to do some self-check. I don't like them as a way to justify whether or not you really do know something." Jay adds that Microsoft lets employees take the exams for free, and suggests taking a vendor's test if you can afford it.

Matty's Certification History

Matty got into the Microsoft world doing Apple field service for prepress shops whose RIP stations ran NT 3.51, then took a job at a systems integrator that needed staff to be Microsoft Certified Professionals within 60 days. Matty failed the first exam by one question, developed a method of marking questions known to be right and counting up to a passing score, and later collected an MCP+I and an MCSE of six exams, retaking only Networking Essentials, which had a slightly higher passing score. A coworker once passed all of the MCSE exams in a single day, and Matty once bet a senior sysadmin over who could pass more exams at TechEd and won, despite the sysadmin being a better engineer. Matty last certified on Microsoft in 2003 and was among the first Chef Certified Developers, an exam that was mostly lab.

Memorization and Hiring

Jay says between about 1999 and 2006 IT recruiters believed certifications were the bellwether of a good technologist, which Jay thinks was mostly memorization, and for-profit schools promised day-one jobs. Matty says the exams taught "the way that that vendor wanted you to answer the question," a stamp of approval as their representative, and that without a college degree the certs gave hiring managers reassurance. Matty adds that later exams, like the CCIE lab and Chef's, became hands-on. Jay notes interviews moved from paper credentials to practice.

Interviews That Match Real Work

Matty argues tests that forbid Google are flawed, since work involves API docs, a search window and an editor. Matty prepared for a coding interview by writing a little Go against the company's API, and the interviewers were happy to let Matty pull up the existing code. Matty says "if you want to understand how someone is going to work, you need to replicate the conditions upon where they will work," and praises an old interview where three team members posed a real problem and asked the candidate to lead. Jay says they should expect people to build things, not repeat information, and Matty adds that it's about being able to "synthesize information and not just memorize information."

Learning Again

Jay says learning new things as a 40-year-old is worth continuing, through video tutorials, better documentation, and the cert as a self-check, and that tools change, noting Corey Quinn's comment that Kubernetes won't matter in five years, even if every company keeps a legacy thing. Matty says a certificate is "a nice carrot," and what matters is that you care about it. Matty recalls rereading old Outlook email from a network engineering job about frame relay, knowledge now irrelevant.

On-Call Stories Without the Glory

Jay says on the podcast Jay tells old-days stories without glorifying them. Jay's worst on-call moment, around 2005 or 2006, was a Saturday-evening storm when the automatic transfer switch at a New Jersey data center failed to move to the UPS and generator, taking down about 2,600 servers, followed by a night of fsck and repairs. Jay's reflection: "I didn't learn a damn thing," except that the company hadn't made the right decisions. Matty describes patching SQL Slammer by logging into thousands of servers in different domains, which wasn't a battle scar worth being proud of. Matty tells of a night early in a career when a mail server went down and the boss and owner, who had said to leave it alone, took the server completely apart on the floor overnight, so the informal postmortem lesson was "keep the boss away from things that are broken." Matty also recalls a change request rejected for lacking a backup plan for turning a server off, where the answer was to turn it back on.

Wrapping Up

Jay hopes the episode said something about learning: some certifications are worth it, Amazon's for example, for certain roles, as a way to test yourself, not as a mark of being good at a job. Matty has been relearning incident management through PagerDuty training and is taking an incident commander rotation, carrying a pager again, and jokes about an Arrested DevOps Listener Certification, with questions about Bridget's preferred airline and Trevor's favorite anime.

• Previous episode: Punk Rock DevOps

• Oncall Nightmares Podcast

• Image credit: aesthetictech.net

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