Certified idiots

I just saw a post in one of the forums, I almost replied there but this isn't really a proper and/or constructive response, so it goes here instead, this is one thing that really irks me: Technical certifications.

I really couldn't care less about your 'certifications' - they do not impress me one bit, in fact I actually have a cynical hostile contempt for them. I know it's kinda discriminating and generalizing, but it's based on my own personal and professional experience for decades.

Let me give you a couple examples:
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My brother in law has a CNA, A+, MSCE, some Cisco cert, a whole can of alphabet soup after his name, and he can't figure out how to ftp a file to a working ftp server given the host, username, and password. In another instance, I told him to telnet to port 80 of a server to verify the service was running. He responded that he turned telnet off on the server and we should be using ssh instead, and suggested I brush up on my server security..

I work closely with many IT departments, the most clueless people I know of belong to a 45-employee IT department full of certified idiots.

Listen to the radio commercials - MS certified in 6 months with no technical background?? Cmon, get the hell OUT of my datacenter..... I'm getting mad just thinking about it! >

Now let's check the flip side:
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I have 2 programmers in my crew, one of which never went to college at all, the other has some non-technical B.A. degree. Neither of them have any certs, and both of them will code circles around anyone I know. They cut and solder hardware, stuff your normal IT bosses wouldn't even consider. They MAKE stuff work when your average crew would give up and say it can't be done.

Self-taught homegrown hackers know it, understand it, they LIVED it. They sat around in basements figuring stuff out on their own, because they ENJOYED doing it! They enjoyed meeting like-minded people on modem bbs's in the 80's, the IRC and USENET in the 90's, etc. Back then, you HAD to be a little more technical to even be online in the first place, I'll bet my BIL doesn't even know what the IRC is! 1/2 the 'certified pros' nowadays have never really worked in a command line environment, and don't understand what their little GUI config programs are doing. I'll take a handful of my homegrown hackers over a whole floor full of 'certified IT pros' any day.