Gary Varga (12/23/2013)
At the time I was working with a manager who was hiring and, therefore, trawling through a huge number of CVs and conducting a large number of interviews. Many of the candidates appeared to be graduating having done the equivalent certification to what I was considering. Unfortunately, most of them were struggling to answer basic software development questions. Clearly they had been learning how to pass the tests as opposed to learning the course syllabus. They were from institutes from different countries so it appeared to be a global trend (no xenophobia here, move along). There was also a trend beginning in "fake" university degrees.
Being one of the folks that pre-examines resumes and conducts interviews for many of the companies that I worked for (and some that I have not), I also noticed both of those trends. I also noticed it in many of the people that were already working at a company. It's a real shame for the industry that there are so many posers and fakers that have cheated the system.
It's definitely not a new trend and seems to have gotten much worse over time. For example, I've recently completed interviews on 3 different "DBAs", each with more than 10 years of experience on their resumes and all claimed expertise in "tuning queries". None of the 3 could tell me what a clustered index was, never mind the differences between CIs and NCIs, and none of them could tell me how to do a native backup nor how to get the current date and time.
I won't get into how many supposed developers I've interviewed in the last 2 years and how completely ignorant they were of not only T-SQL but of their own trade, in general. Only 1 "met expections" and she was fantastic. She had no certs, either. I sometimes think that people without certs work harder at learning.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.