I have a special disdain for professional certifications in technology. Largely, they are indoctrinations designed to protect market-share.

An example that leaps to mind is a lukewarm intellect I encountered who – to his credit – worked really hard, and probably still is a certified Microsoft SQL Server guy. When a solution at the company we worked was best served by MySQL, he refused to touch it. It threatened him. He thought doing anything with MySQL would taint him. When it comes to professional certifications, he embodied what I’d seen over the span of two decades, where professional certifications were hammers and everything was a nail. Even zippers, which typically gives the result you would think.

I bring this up because, once again, I got a LinkedIn connection request from someone, I accepted, and they immediately started messaging me about ‘professional certifications’. I’m sort-of-kind-of-not-really-but-am retired. I didn’t want a professional certification when I was working – some employers did, but they learned to get along with me and not needing training papers laid out on the ground, as if I were a puppy.

There’s a little disdain in there.

When I started with technology, there weren’t certifications. You either knew things or you didn’t, you either learned things or you didn’t. I showed up for an interview at the first company I worked at in Texas dressed like a bad waiter.  With a briefcase, empty, but there for effect. My interviewer had ripped jeans. He asked me if I knew ‘C’ and ‘C++’. I said ‘yes’. I was hired. And I spent the weekend in the DeVry computer lab learning C and C++. Monday, I was coding for cash. It was 1989, I think.

And that’s how I worked over the years. I rode the waves of technology – leaving one engineering position in a multinational corporation to get into the Internet related technologies, working the ‘back end’ before we called it a back-end. From there, I rode waves – Content Management Systems, handwriting recognition, analyzing terabytes of data, and so on and so forth – moving on to the next interesting thing that was coming by long before they installed the bureaucracies of certifications. And when they started with the certifications, I moved on to something else. I even found myself writing guides – well received guides – for the certification site, “CramSession.com”, back in the day.

Don’t use the toilet at an interview unless you can demonstrate you’re certified on that. A note from your parents is not a certification, that’s just a reference.

So, I watch people who go out and get these certifications – a magical checklist of a roadmap that someone spread out ahead of them so that they could suckle their way up the food chain – or so they said. But when a company needed someone to get something working fast, as one former Director told me, I was the ‘team’ that came through, got results, and did things no one else could.

It’s what I do. I solve problems, not chase papers.

I still am. It’s who I had to be. It’s the unrestrained magic that Generation X had when we started that I managed to hold onto throughout. We grew up watching college dropouts begin to run the world. Bill Gates, The Woz (you might have heard of his partner, Steve Jobs). They thumbed their noses at the world and changed it… and promptly, with help from their peers and underlings, laid the foundation for something that they would have thumbed their noses at when they were kids. Full circle, like so many other things in life.

So do me a favor. Spare me the certification spam. I’ve written better documentation myself, and I have references.

Kthxbai.