Brain Dumps, VARs, and Toiletfeet: The Certification Debate | Chaos Lever

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Chris: Neither one of them was the Steve Jobs movie, which would have been saved if they actually included the scene where he puts his feet in the toilet, because that's a real thing that happens. And I keep telling everybody about it because my God.

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Ned: That is your favorite fact. Not that he was a fruitetarian, which is also just bonkers.

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Chris: Nothing is going to be more bonkers than toilet feet. I'm sorry.

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Ned: Hello, legend human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot or a Steve Jobs. I'm a real human person who has feelings, dreams, and feet that have never been in a toilet bowl. With me is Chris, who is also not standing in a toilet bowl, I hope. Hi, Chris.

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Chris: Certainly not a public toilet bowl. What I do in my own home is my own business, and I will thank you to just get up off my back about it.

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Ned: It would explain why your feet are that strange shade of blue.

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Chris: That just shows how clean the toilet is, allegedly.

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Ned: In theory, if one were to do such a thing.

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Chris: I do think we should go with, anytime we reference Steve Jobs from now on, we call him Steve Toiletfeet Jobs.

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Ned: Oh, I like that. We're not going to shorten it to Steve TF Jobs. No. No. No. Full Toiletfeet every time.

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Chris: There's a certain amount of respect that needs to be paid for somebody who is consistently that gross in public.

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Ned: Gross and awful.

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Chris: True. But many people are awful in public. Often, it's one or the other.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: It takes a special genius to do both.

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Ned: Well, he did think different, and I think that's what's important.

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Chris: Think different. Think toilet feet.

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Ned: All right. I was thinking about our conversation last week, and we were talking about the tech hiring process and how it's broken.

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Chris: I have no recollection of that whatsoever.

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Ned: Well, that's good because I'm not going to reference it again.

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Chris: Perfect.

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Ned: But it did lead me to think a little bit about certifications in IT, because part of how you allegedly get a job is getting certifications. I I wondered, is that still true? Do certifications still matter? Then I started thinking about, how old are certifications? How long have these things been around? Then I thought to myself, well, shit, this is a chaos lever topic. Here we are. As long as I've been working in tech, I have had some type of certification. For me, it started back in the year 2000 or 2001 with the A+ certification. I would try to look up the actual year, but I don't think their database goes back that far.

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Chris: No. As all young people know, the world only began in 2006. Anything older than that, forget about it.

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Ned: But also accurate. At the time, I was told by several people who were already in the industry or were educators or instructors that getting your A+ certification was surefire way to break into tech. Granted an entry-level position, but still a way to get into technology. That's what I wanted to do. So armed with that certificate and a two-year degree from the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, which I am not entirely certain still exists, I began applying for jobs in 2002. I was lucky enough to land an interview at FAO Inc, a company that owned Zaney Brainy, FAO Schwartz, and the Right Start. I guarantee that listeners have heard of one of those companies.

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Chris: Yeah, I've never heard of the Right Start. I know that much.

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Ned: Well, Zaney Brainy was pretty local to the Philadelphia area, so it was a toy store focused on educational toys, but just sold toys.

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Chris: Educational. That's why I didn't get it.

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Ned: Yeah. Fao Sports, everybody knows from the movie Big. Right. We've all seen that movie. We're all the same age. The The Right Start was an educational toys and accessories and things for toddlers and babies. So getting them off to the right start.

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Chris: I see.

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Ned: I believe the Right Start is still in business. It got sold off after the company went up for bankruptcy. Zaney Brainy got killed by Walmart. It just never stood a damn chance. Fao, same thing. There's still two FAO stores open, and they're in Vegas and New York, and that's it. All the rest of them closed down because Walmart and Target, basically. When I joined them, the company itself had already declared bankruptcy once, and then it did so again 18 months later.

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Chris: Good job, Ned.

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Ned: Yeah. The writing was on the wall, but that's a story for another time. We don't have to get into that. During my interview, when I sat down with my prospective manager, he asked me a series of questions, technical questions, to probe what I knew about basic troubleshooting, computer hardware, and TCP/IP networking. My A+ certification had actually prepared me to not totally bomb this line of inquiry. I managed to walk away with a verbal offer and a whole new world opening up before me. Cue the Disney music. Go ahead.

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Chris: We're all hearing it. I don't even have to sing it.

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Ned: It was a new, fantastic point of view. So yeah, when people ask me if I think certification matters, I tell them it sure shit did in 2002. Not so sure now. What about you? Was certification instrumental to you getting your first tech job, or were you just like a nepo baby?

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Chris: Well, no. Some of us were just born naturally brilliant. I've been riding that particular horse for a while. No, I did not. My first job started out as an errand boy, basically, not even hands-on keyboards or anything like that. And it just the more classic work your way up to something of an official status. It started out as a student worker job, and then it turned into a full-time job after I graduated, and then that job became increasingly higher levels of responsibility and whatnot. I believe I did not get my first certification of any until I was already a full-time employee. If I remember correctly, it was something involving Unix. It was not Red Hat. That came later.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: Then the first real certification I got was when I got into consulting and got the VCPs.

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Ned: Got you. That was pretty important, at least for the time. Yeah. Vcp is the VMware Certified Professional, in case anybody's wondering.

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Chris: I had four of them.

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Ned: You mean you had VCP four, then five, then six? Right. I think I stopped at six. I never got any of the advanced VMware certification.

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Chris: No, then it became VCAP, and then you had to do a presentation. Yeah.

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Ned: Yeah. Vcdx, where you had to defend a dissertation? Yeah. Yeah, I did not do that. Certification is not a unique idea to technology. We did not invent this. I got my associate's degree from PIT, which has no affiliation with PIT, so I could say I went to PIT and just not clarify for people. Well, I looked it up, and they do still exist, but they don't offer computer classes anymore, which I find strange given their name. But they do have a number of certifications available, including Clinical Medical Assistant and Autopsy Technician. What does it take to become an autopsy tech, you might ask? Well, even if you didn't, I'm going to tell you. First, you have to be working at a morgue or a funeral home for at least six months to apply for this program. Then you take about eight classes over two semesters, and you also have to do 60 hours of what they call an extern-ship, which is just doing your job. Then boom, you're an autopsy tech. You can officially assist with autopsies at the morg. So cool. I know what I'm going to do next. I don't know. It seems like it might be fun.

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Ned: Maybe not. I don't know. I'll have to give more thought.

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Chris: Have you ever seen the autopsy or the mortician YouTube channel. I can't remember the guy's name right now, but he's got several million subscribers, and he's very, very gleeful while talking about death.

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Ned: Sweet. Well, now I know what I'm going to do with my evening. Actuaries have certification certifications. So do plumbers and teachers. My wife is certified to teach math to middle and high school students, whether they want to learn it or not. Based on an article by Calvin Harper from GoCertify, it was It was the guilds that really popularized the idea of certifications, going all the way back to the 1500s. It was important for guilds and tradesmen to have a way of proving their skills, especially if they were by others and then started traveling around. It may have started with a traditional apprenticeship, journeyman, and then master progression, but as professions proliferated and became more specialized, so did the training process and the means by which you proved that you got the training.

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Chris: This was also an exclusionary thing.

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Ned: Oh, absolutely. We'll come back around on that towards the end. The first official IT Cert, at least as far as I can tell, was the Certified Information Systems Auditor, CISA Cert, offered back in 1978 by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, or ISACA. It's a good one. I like that one. They have been around since 1969, and the certification was all about auditing, compliance, and governance. It is technically an IT certification, but it's really for auditors, not IT professionals. According to Jason Eckert, the first technology company to offer a certification was Santa Cruz Operation, which sounds like a skateboarding move and not a company, but they were, in fact, engaged heavily with Unix. They offered certifications in 1985 based on their Unix products. They had three tiers of certification. You could become a certified Unix systems administrator, an advanced computing expert, and a a master advanced computing expert or a MACE. Chris, didn't you have a MICE, or was it Mace?

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Chris: This got confusing because Mace was terminology that was picked up by HP and HPE. If you remember that, you were Ace first and you were Mace second. Yep. Completely unrelated. I never had much to do with SCO, S-C-O, because they were the devil.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: They were evil, sad people who made me mad. Or was it opposite? Were they mad people who made me sad?

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Ned: Were they sad people that made you evil?

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Chris: Oh, that might be the one.

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Ned: Yeah, it seems the most likely. Most people have never heard of SEO, but I'm guessing a few folks in our audience recall the next company to get into the certification games, and that was Novel in 1986 for their Novel Netware line of products. For those who are not familiar, and we've covered this in previous episodes, Netware was both a networking protocol and a directory solution, a predecessor to LDAP. They followed a similar naming path of administrator, expert, and master expert. I guess SEO set a standard. Not a great one, but they did.

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Chris: Yeah, I was going to say, good for them.

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Ned: Once the '90s hit and becoming an IT professional became a legitimate career path, the certification market exploded. You had Comp IA, Microsoft, and Cisco, just to name a few. I named them because I had certifications from all three at one point. Along with that, you started to see the rise of testing centers like Pearson View and Prometric, who would torture you indefinitely with terrible technology and awful waiting rooms. But they also, in theory, helped these technology companies administer their exams in a controlled setting.

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Chris: Utilizing the cheapest keyboards and mouses that were ever created by the hand of man.

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Ned: I think the last time I saw a functional CRT and beige computer tower was at a Pearson view.

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Chris: Yeah, that totally tracks.

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Ned: Everyone else flat screens, and I think we'd move to gray or black for our desktops, but they still had a gateway 2000 with the cow print on it and a massive CRT that would pop when it switched from one system to another. Oh, Christ. The proliferation of certifications continued in the 2000s up until today. If you're a technology vendor of any size, or at least medium size, you probably have a certification program. That is especially useful for training partners who might be delivering your solutions. It's also a sales tactic to lock people into your technology or force them to learn about new features that no one actually needs or wants. I'm looking at you, Microsoft and Cisco.

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Chris: You're going to talk about the pricing pitch situation with these two later on?

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Ned: Oh, we're going to talk about the price breaks that you get for having the certifications as a partner. Don't worry. Don't worry, we'll get into that. Almost as soon as there were certifications, there were cheaters and frauds. Hey, remember we talked about that last week? Cheat on everything. People who wanted the glory without the I would love to claim the high ground and say I'm innocent on this front, but I already admitted to using brain dumps last week. We glossed over that, though. So what the hell is a brain dump? It's basically a list of questions that get asked on the exam, along with the, and I'm going to put this in air quotes, correct answer. The brain dumps you get would not always have the correct answer. But they had all of the possible answers, so you could figure it out. I suppose some of the brain dumps came from autodidacts, but I'm guessing more of them came from questionable testing facilities that would unscrupulously scrape the question bank out of the machines because they were always verbatim.

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Chris: It doesn't even have to be that complicated. They could be unscrupulous enough to just take pictures of the screen.

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Ned: Yeah, some of them were literally just screen captures, and some of them were someone with a video camera just filming it the whole time. And once you had enough people take the test, you would get the entire bank of questions. Because not every tester would get every question. They would have a bank of 300 some odd questions, and you would maybe see 60 of them. Now, if you've never taken a certification before. First of all, dear listener, I envy you. But the vast majority of exams are multiple choice and fill in the blank style because that's easy. There are variations on a theme like moving matching pairs of boxes or clicking on the right area of a screen grab. But the point is, very few are some actual live exercise where you're typing in commands or performing some operation. As such, if you can get your hands on the questions ahead of time and memorize the answers, you're basically golden. The questions change over time, but not very often. I think the cadence for a lot of them is to update the question bank once a year.

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Chris: I was going to say two years, but you might be right these days.

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Ned: Yeah, and that's because as someone who has written questions for exams before, if you've taken the vault associate exam or the Terraformer associate exam, some of my questions are probably still in there. But the process is time consuming and it takes a lot of effort. You need to come up with a list of topics, levels of questions to ask for each topic, and then find someone with the requisite knowledge to write those questions. Once the questions are When they're written, others have to review them for accuracy and readability. Finally, they get added to a question bank as beta questions to verify test takers are able to parse the question and answer correctly. Adding new questions is hard and stealing them is super easy. But if you're working for a technology partner and in danger of losing deals, if you don't maintain your platinum partner status, then you'll do what you have to in order to pass these exams. If that sentence was confusing to you, that means you've never worked for a VAR before. Now I'm doubly jealous of you. It wasn't all bad. I mean, I met really cool people, and you, Chris.

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Chris: You're welcome. Yeah.

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Ned: Just as a little bit of background, a little aside, but this does factor back into what you're talking about with the discounts. Most technology vendors don't sell directly to the public, especially when it comes to enterprise sales. Instead, they sell their wares through partners who are called value-added resellers or VARs. When it comes to software, that has shifted a lot with the rise of subscription pricing and self-service. You can just go and buy the licenses yourself. But that's a conversation for another broadcom.

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Chris: Burn.

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Ned: In theory, the VAR knows the vendor's product line extremely well, and they know their client's environments really well, and they facilitate designing a solution that meets their client's needs based off of what the vendor has to offer. They also offer implementation services to deploy the hardware or software in the client's environment. I say in theory, that was not always true in practice. Was I constantly reading the next page of the manual before I got to the next step? Yeah, I might have done that a few times. But anyway. How do you become a technology partner? How do you become a VAR? You do it by proving that you know the vendor's product line. How do you prove that? By passing their certifications. The vendors have different tiers of partners. Silver, gold, platinum, diamond, I don't know, something higher, ruby, who knows? Each has increasing requirements around certifications and sales numbers. If you have 10 HPE MACE-certified technologists and $100 million in sales, that might qualify you as an HPE platinum partner. I don't know if that's even close to the actual requirements.

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Chris: It's fine to just make up numbers because the part where it makes things interesting is Vars can be of many different sizes. There are Vars that are literally global companies that sell to every single country that has computers in it. There are Vars that are extremely regional and only sell within, say, I don't know, a tri-state area or even within one state, depending on... I'm sure there are Vars in Texas that never do business outside the state of Texas, for example. But if you want that platinum partnership, guess what? Both companies have to hit 10 HPE Macy's and $100 million in sales.

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Ned: It's a little easier for the CDNs of the world to do it.

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Chris: It's not quite a level playing field, right?

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Ned: Yeah. The higher The higher up you are in... I said CDN, I meant CDW. The higher up you are in the partner tier, the more perks you get. The vendor will give you more points on a deal and often bigger discounts. If you're like a silver partner, you might get 15% off of list price, while a platinum partner might get 40% off of list price. No one ever actually pays list price, just so we're clear. I have seen Cisco deals where the discount was upwards of 70% off of list, which makes you wonder, what the hell is list pricing for?

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Chris: Yeah, I mean, that's a weird thing about commerce in general, too. Only suckers pay retail.

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Ned: In addition to the discounts, you also get priority deal registration and access to more resources on the vendor side. I mean, being a VAR, it could be an entire episode, so I'm not going to go too deep into this. But basically, if you want to be a successful VAR, you need to climb these partner tiers, and that means making sure your associates are certified. Which brings me back to studying brain dumps of the Citrix Net Scaler to pass their professional level exam so we could maintain platinum status. Wee.

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Chris: Allegedly.

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Ned: No, I mean, at this point, I don't work for a VAR. All those ill-gotten certificates Certifications have all lapsed, so I'm really not worried about admitting to this. If I do get any new certifications, I'll actually learn the thing because I'm doing it for me, not my boss's boss. But that does lead me to the next question, which, are certifications actually worthwhile? Chris, are they worthwhile?

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Chris: It depends. Next question.

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Ned: There it is. The The two-word phrase that every consultant loves to say and every client loaths to hear. It does depend. The certifications I currently hold all serve a purpose for me financially. When I was in consulting, it was important for me to have Microsoft Azure and AWS Certs, like the CISOPS Pro. Those were a credential to my clients. Look, look at me, potential customer. I know what I'm doing. And most of the I did. Now that I don't do any of that consulting, I have let all of my AWS and Azure Certs lapse. The last one I still had, the AWS CISOPS Pro, it lapsed in November, and I did not choose to re-up it. What I primarily do these days is deliver training and live instruction for HashiCorp products, which is why I have the associate and professional-level Certs for vault and Terraform. I know those products so well that I even have to study for any of the four exams. Sounds like you don't ever study for any exams.

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Chris: Zing.

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Ned: As long as I continue to teach those products, I'll keep my certifications active. Do the certs actually make me more hireable? Maybe. But I feel like I'm expected to have them as the instructor, so I do. Also, it's not hard to maintain them. It's like an hour out of my day every two years. What about... Chris, I know you have the CISSP. Is that something you feel is worthwhile and helpful to you?

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Chris: I mean, that's a complicated one. I wasn't sure where you were going to go with this in terms of the certifications, because I think part of the it depends is there are levels of certification that start from, let's just say, the vendor ones that we have a little bit of skepticism around and are also something Something that the vendors often charge for, which becomes a little revenue stream for them. Aws, in particular, is pretty famous for having about 700,000 certifications that you can get, all of which clearly do ask questions about AWS, but all of them also often use the same testing bank. You'll notice that, and I've seen this before firsthand, if you take the intro level certification X and you pass it, and then you take intermediate level X, a couple of the questions are going to be exactly the same. Are those certifications worth it? Is a great question. As you build up to some of the more prestigious certifications, like the VCAAP or the VCDX that we talked about from the VMware world, the certification process changes. Those become something like a premier cert. The CISSP I would say it's a mid-major below a VCDX because there is actually higher-level CISSP and CISSP extensions that you can get that I have not gone after just yet.

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Ned: Good God.

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Chris: The CISSP was extremely hard. It took me, and I don't not think I would have passed it if I was not unemployed at the time, because I was studying for that legitimately from studying materials, taking practice tests, listening to podcasts. I got a Udemy course. It was a whole situation just to get through that thing. When I finished the test, I felt like I had a concussion. The thing that drives me insane about that one, and this is also part of the certification process, you just get information about pass/fail. You succeeded or you didn't. That's the only piece of feedback that you get. If I passed it by one question or if I failed it by one question, my level of knowledge is exactly the same, more or Pass, right? Right. 51% versus 49%. That doesn't super help me. I would love to have known because there's domains and there's different specific areas of tracks of study inside of CSSP. Maybe I killed it on four of them, and I completely missed every single question on one. Why won't you tell me that?

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Ned: Yeah, at least it would give you an idea of what to study for if you didn't pass.

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Chris: Right. I feel a little bit of skepticism about some of the lower ones in particular, because I do believe that they are a little bit cynical and they are a money grab. But as you go higher up, it does take more effort to get the certification and to maintain the certification. Those I do think matter more because it should, like what you just said about your certs, if they align closely with what you do on a daily basis, even if the cert is silly, it's still your job on a daily basis. You should have those certifications.

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Ned: Yeah. And the other thing that I'll mention about the certifications is most of them require you to get those lower-level certs first instead of just jumping to the mid-tier or the upper-tier certs, which sucks if you are someone who knows that content inside and out. It's literally just paying additional money for that badge so you can move to the next level. I feel like you should be able to just jump the If I can pass the professional level of your exam, I don't need to take the associate, too.

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Chris: Right. But you do because that's another $200 in Amazon's pocket. Or I mean, Anonymous Company X's pocket.

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Ned: I don't think that certifications and exams are a moneymaker directly to the vendor. But the vendors are the ones who write the objectives. And while some of it is is going to be applicable to your situation. They're also under pressure from the product marketing groups and program manager groups to include cool features and proprietary cruft that you'll never use. That It takes its way into the exams. It's a way of teaching people about your product and how you want them to use it. They are going to share that knowledge with other people, especially if they're in a consulting role where they touch multiple clients. In a way, certifications are a way for you to spread the gospel of your product to a bunch of people who are going to repeat what you said because they've learned it by rote, literally. I think that's the main benefit for the vendors is to just have people who are preaching the gospel. I've seen this with anybody who's the advanced Cisco certifications. They do things the Cisco way, and they prefer Cisco products because they know that product line. It's very hard to break them out of that sometimes.

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Ned: Now, some people think about getting certifications as a way to learn. I guess you like learning? Nerds. In the past, I have used certifications as a guide to learning new technical material. But I mean, they give you a whole list of objectives and training material that is focused only around passing the certification. My hot take as an instructor is that is a shitty way to learn technology. Like I said, the vendors are the ones who write the objectives, so they are going to bend the certification towards what they want you to learn. I think it also makes for crappier courses If you're teaching or taking a certification-focused course, you're literally teaching to the test, and that means that your students are only going to learn enough to pass. If you need a certificate to keep a partner level, I guess it's worth it. But if you really want to know how a piece of technology works, I would not go through a certification program to do that.

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Chris: I think there also is a difference between certifications that are done by the vendors for a lot of the reasons you just talked about, and certifications that are by something else, a general body of some sort. Cissp, for example, famously not tied to a product per se. It's by the IAC2, which is International Security Consortium Committee, some shit like that. We love acronyms, but it's not the Microsoft Security Certification, which would be very much to your point, would focus on defender So not only is it you're focusing on market texture, but you're also narrowing your field of vision. There are more ways to secure things than just Microsoft Defender.

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Ned: Many more. Some that are arguably better. If you are just getting started in IT and you want to get some certifications under your belt to show that you're a learner and you're a go-getter, I would recommend getting Vendor Agnostic Certs. A plus is still a certification that exists. They have changed it. They don't ask you to understand the interrupt request lines to a CPU anymore. Or how ISO works. They've changed it a little bit. Network Plus, I hear, is also very good. Any of the certifications from the Linux Foundation are good starting points. They're vendor agnostic, so they're not teaching you a distribution of Linux. They're teaching you just general best practices and how to administer a Linux-based system. The Kubernetes certifications, those are administered by the CNCF. Those are also good, but they are also super hard. I would not start there if I was a junior admin. Maybe work your way up to that.

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Chris: Or ever.

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Ned: The Kubernetes certifications in particular are all live practical exams. They give you an objective and an environment and say, Go achieve that objective. That's it.

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Chris: Red Hat enterprise Linux certifications, at least they used to, would do the same thing.

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Ned: Personally, I think that those types of certifications are more valuable because it means you actually proved that you can do the thing. You still could have memorized the exact steps for the objectives that were in the exam, but that's going to get you a lot further than just memorizing answers in a brain dump. Right.

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Chris: Agreed.

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Ned: If you are using certifications as a way to get hired, honestly, getting hired is more about knowing somebody than being able to pass an exam. It's more about getting through the employer's weird screening process that we covered last week. Maybe having a certification gets you through the resume. It gets you through the resume filters in the first round. But knowing Gina over an HR will get you through way faster. I'm not saying that you should social engineer your way into your next job, but I'm not not saying that.

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Chris: Think about it.

[00:34:38.15]
Ned: I mean, is it really social engineering? If you're just being friendly, you happen to connect with people on LinkedIn, that work where you want to be hired? It seems all right. Of course, you're not pushy. If you're going to dump a thousand hours into studying for exams, take a hundred of those hours and make connections instead. Be a social human. That's probably going to get you the job faster. The last thing I want to bring up is that there's also getting certifications for the sake of peacocking. If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you probably know what I mean. There's this group of people who just love showing off the 20 to 30 certifications they have and their gold AWS jacket, which you can get if you've passed 12 of their exams, I want to say.

[00:35:28.09]
Chris: It's 12 or 16. Is that a real thing? Are you making this Please tell me you're making this up.

[00:35:31.18]
Ned: No. God, I wish I was making this. I saw someone with a gold AWS jacket at Reinvent, and I didn't know what it was, and I thought they had it made for themselves. Then I found out if you pass, it's either 12 or 16 AWS certifications, which at the time was the total number of certifications they had. And you're an AWS partner, you can apply to get the gold AWS jacket. It is as ugly as it sounds.

[00:35:59.15]
Chris: Fifteen certifications as of last year.

[00:36:02.17]
Ned: Fifteen. If you're an AWS partner or a community builder, you can apply to get the jacket.

[00:36:09.01]
Chris: Oh.

[00:36:10.20]
Ned: Yeah, it's awful. I'll include a link in the description if people want to see this jacket. I don't think you should.

[00:36:17.29]
Chris: I don't think you should. That's going to hurt people's eyes.

[00:36:20.11]
Ned: Yes. For those people- This is like bowling on disco night.

[00:36:25.17]
Chris: What the hell is going on?

[00:36:27.14]
Ned: I know. If you have that gold jacket or you've passed 30 certifications across all the cloud vendors, I think it's just bragging rights and also that you really enjoy taking exams. That's cool. I'm not here to yuck anyone's gum, especially since I'm the one who's planning to run a 50K tomorrow, I know my hobby is weird and masochistic, so who am I to judge?

[00:36:52.18]
Chris: That's fair. You are weird. What were we talking about?

[00:36:57.06]
Ned: Well, I was going to talk about the CCIE and the VCDX, but-Yeah, we don't need to do that. For the sake of time, we'll move right along. Certification is not training. We talked earlier about the history of certifications and how they grew out of guilds and a need to show that you've achieved a certain level of skill in a trade. You know what else those guilds and trades had? A formal mentorship process and well-defined curricula. And IT doesn't have any of that. Maybe we should. I know technology moves fast, and it would be hard for a trade to keep up. And the idea of a guild necessarily implies gatekeepers who restrict who can become an apprentice and a journeyman. I think that harkens back to what you were saying. If you have a guild, that means some people are not in the guild, and then they can't apply that trade.

[00:37:55.10]
Chris: Right. If we've learned anything from Discworld, it's important to be in the right guild.

[00:38:01.17]
Ned: The second time Discworld has come up today, and I'm here for it. On the other hand, IT claims to be a meritocracy today without gatekeepers. You could say, wouldn't guilds just make it harder to break into the industry and ruin the meritocracy? Number one, it is adorable that you think IT is a meritocracy. And two, we already have gatekeepers, and they suck.

[00:38:28.09]
Chris: Just is like a concept. Not advisable.

[00:38:33.08]
Ned: I have worked far too many places and seen far too many incompetent admins skate by on charm and make up for what they lack in technical skill with raw political pandering. Yes, merit counts in IT, but not as much as you might think.

[00:38:51.18]
Chris: Definitely, again, it's important to remember that IT is a profession, and just like every profession, There are many different ways to get ahead. Yes.

[00:39:04.22]
Ned: People fail upwards all the time. The gatekeepers of IT are the tyranny of the hiring process. Far too many people are screened out because they don't fit some preconceived notion of what an IT professional looks like, talks like, acts like. If you think that I'm talking some DEI nonsense, fucking A, right I am. There is a paucity of women and people of color in technology, and the world of technology is poorer for it. My hope would be a guild or a union system would be able to level the hiring, the playing field for hiring somewhat. Hard to see how it could make things worse. But I don't know. We're creative humans. We could probably do it. The irony is that AI is coming for us all and it's going to burn everything down to the ground anyway. So maybe certifications and learning are pointless endeavors, and we should all just prepare ourselves to shovel virtual coal into the boilers of our AI deities. I don't know. I'm tired. My fingers hurt. That's where I stopped. Any last thoughts, Chris? That is a full sentence right there. Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end.

[00:40:27.01]
Ned: So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. I can go sit on the couch, eat a Chilly dog, and play Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I didn't feel like coming up with a new outro, and neither did you. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever. Go to the website, chaoslever. Com. Go into your podcast. It's a thing of choice, and leave us a good review. We appreciate those. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.

[00:40:59.00]
Chris: We'll be back next week with another certification?

[00:41:07.17]
Ned: A hiring thing.

[00:41:08.28]
Chris: And a plaid jacket.

[00:41:11.02]
Ned: My God, man, they've gone to plaid.