> While it's entirely possible you are completely correct, he might have > a point. I've never taken the CISSP stuff (or looked at any of the > materials or anything), so take what I say with the whole lick of > salt.
About "bookish", he probably has a point, though it can hardly be otherwise. I myself recently took and passed CCNA. (I don't know what's in CISSP, but CCNA I can fairly judge.) Some of it was quite product-specific -- What does this amber LED mean on this or that Cisco model? -- as opposed to being about the technology (IP over Ethernet), but for a Cisco-brand exam I didn't think it was excessive. And if you own that model, you really might need to know that the amber LED on that switch means "evacuate the building". :-) I was more concerned about some of the just plain sloppy work in the book I had. (McGraw-Hill, but the others were worse.) It became a sport, among the 3 friends who assembled as a study team, to find the glaring error in the questions, as much as the answers. The actual test was better. (I think. They don't tell you which ones you got "right".) I was surprised at how difficult this "entry-level" exam was. I'd been wrangling IOS since 8.3 (ca. 1989) so I was a little cocky. The switching stuff killed me -- STP and VLANs and tigers, oh my! -- and I had to actually buy the book and study before taking the test again. But even so, I would never put "CCNA" in my resume, whatever it means, until I passed the damn test, however silly. I wouldn't hold any certification against someone, assuming I got to talk to them. I can distinguish a highly-certified bullshitter from a self-taught genius, but only if I get to talk to them, and only because I know my onions. I dislike making it a litmus test, and I have stories about people hired over my objection (who subsequently proved me right) just because they had a Masters Degree or something. But then I don't have to sift through 500,000 resumes in some field where I am ignorant, so I can see that it has some apparent utility at the intake end. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
