Question for Pelican Geeks: What do you think about Microsoft Certifications?
 

I'm pretty impressed with this whole .NET development environment and I'm thinking this is a good place to go with my career. I've done about 17 years of mainframe work and this .NET thing is like waking up 500 years in the future. I never want to go back.

But so far, employers appear to be balking at my scant .NET experience - and pretty much ignoring the 17-odd years that came before it. So I am wondering what I can do to dress up my resume. And specifically, I am wondering if any of these various Microsoft Certifications carries any weight. I must confess, if I were hiring programmers, I'd laugh at anybody who walked in with a "certification" from Miscrosoft - especially one based on a multiple choice test:rolleyes:. But I don't know if others feel the same way.

Opinions?

But so far, employers appear to be balking at my scant .NET experience - and pretty much ignoring the 17-odd years that came before it.

From my experience, they're balking at the 17 years that came before it, and really couldn't give a hoot about the lack of .net work. They want a college kid who will put in 18 hour days, not some mainframe geezer.

A MS cert wouln't be worth the paper it's printed on.

Janus,
Why throw away 17 years of experience and start competing with new grads that will take anything, work and money?
I know you said you don't want to go back but probably you'll have to... You know there are still a ton of mainframes out there.. and truthfully nobody wants to work on them (at least new generations) so I think you stay there and you'll have a job until you "hang your vt100 keyboard"

Many original develpers have well.. "expired" but they're code is alive and kicking running Airplanes, Massive ships, Banks, manufacturing, etc... and someone has to maintain that.

A MS certification won't buy you much cause new employers want young people with no baggage (sometimes mainframe experience is considered not necessarily good when its time to think outside the box - In my opinion)

Regardless of what happens I wish you the best luck and hopefully everything turns out great for you.

I think the .NET certification would be good if you were being hired by someone who doesn't know anything about .NET. With the certification they can be assured you meet some minimum skill/knowledge level that they wouldn't be able to discern on their own. Otherwise it's toilet paper.

Wow, such a dark view of my options, eh? ;) Well, aside from the fact that I find the .NET world to be simply more interesting than mainframes, it is an undeniable fact that the mainframe market - at least in the Boston area - is on its last legs. I spent 11 of those 17 years in the financial services industry. And the big players in that field are all aggressively moving their mainframe departments overseas. Salaries are in decline and job opportunities are shrinking. I recently did a search on Boston Craigslist and found 33 jobs for COBOL programmers and over 500 for .NET programmers.

So are y'all saying I should give up on the .NET thing and try something more suited to my age like...bingo? ;)

Why work for a large company or "big player"? Some smaller companies (like ours), have no intention to move our mainframe overseas. I wouldn't hesitate to hire an older person with mainframe exp., over some 18-yr-old, who'd rather gawk at our superhero art than work - which is a huge problem in our business, and why we don't hire kids, really.

If I were you, I'd forget the big companies, and focus on the smaller ones who have no time to look after their computer issues themselves - there are a bunch of companies like this. And if you can bring anything else with you in addition to mainframe expertise, like, experience in sales, or anything like that, you'll be hired.

Oh, and as far as Microsoft Certification goes, I agree with Thom. If a person can't figure out with all of Microsoft's hand-holding wizards how to set up a server and clients, they probably can't figure out how to pump their own gasoline, either.

I write custom data management systems. Fwiw, I'm moving away from microsoft. Don't like their direction, which seems primarily focused on DRM. For me, .NET is .NOT -- plus a bit of research into vista and the new-from-scratch networking stack makes me shudder. Ref: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/ATR-VistaAttackSurface.pdf

Have you considered taking your experience and moving to IT management? That way you have a future whether coding goes offshore or not.

Unfortunately I'm seeing about 30% of my large corporate prospects pushing towards .Not these days. Frightening that companies this size would lock themselves in to a proprietary standard when the rest of the world is using J2EE/Web services to do the same thing easier...

MS=BigBrother TYVM

IMO the beauty of .NET is in the development environment. It actually fulfills the promise of RAD without compromises. I am stunned at how much well-written and reliable code can be created with this system in a short time. And since I am a programmer by trade, that is what gets me excited. If you have done, say C++, then you'll be amazed at how C# hides all of the ugly messaging and window painting etc and makes event driven programming easy and intuitive. It is sort of like Java and C++ got married and had a beautiful baby. :)

But I acknowledge that the deployment side is not as slick. .NET is based on a a runtime system much like Java. However, the .NET runtime system does not necessarily ship with Windows and is instead part of a separate 20mb download. So I can understand why system admins may not like it. And like Java, apps are deployed as a platform independent "byte code" which is relatively easy to disassemble and reverse engineer. So there is a real downside.

And as for going into management...well...I'd last about five minutes in management. I just don't have the social skills required. :(

Just some food for thought on .NOT:

Who controls the libraries?
How do you maintain version control?
Runtime backwards compatibility?

They are not trivial questions if you believe your responsibility is to your clients instead of to the ms cash-flow machine.

If you believe that "Microsoft's hand-holding wizards" will setup the server correctly, then I have some swampland in Fla to sell you. It will setup the basics and get it working. If you want it to be reliable and to continue to work in a mission critical position, then you need to know how it really works.

I am living that every day right now. The "previous administration" here built the servers using the wizards. I am fighting out of disk space errors and crashing servers on a daily basis.

Beautiful maybe, but efficient??
I'm a DBA and I've yet to see a .NET app that performs as fast as anything else (you name it), especially with Oracle.
The abstraction layer is very nice for the developers but in the database its just an untunable dog...
In my view .NET is not for things that need high performance database access. I'm sure you can write SQL Directly but that defeats the whole purpose...

Sorry for the drift...

Mainframe work aint gonna go away, believe me. As the pool of experienced folks decreases, your value increases.

If you're looking to make a change, try project management. Good PM's with a technical background i.e. can get in a do the work theselves if need be...are commanding lots of money these days.

Yes, well, everyone's "mission critical" scenario is different. In some cases, you are held by the hand, in other cases, held by the balls. SmileWavy

As a contractor like Janus, I look at what employers are asking for in their job ads. A quick search of some job boards for MCSD (MS Certified Solution Developer) yields the following:
Dice - 282 hits
Monster - 465 hits
There are other MS certs like MCAD (MS Application Developer) but searching on them gets you lots of Mechanical CAD hits instead.


I'm not a certified developer but I'm strongly considering it as a way of learning things that are outside my current "comfort zone" and increasing my marketability down the road.



-Chris

As a contractor like Janus, I look at what employers are asking for in their job ads. A quick search of some job boards for MCSD (MS Certified Solution Developer) yields the following:
Dice - 282 hits
Monster - 465 hits
There are other MS certs like MCAD (MS Application Developer) but searching on them gets you lots of Mechanical CAD hits instead.

I'm not a certified developer but I'm strongly considering it as a way of learning things that are outside my current "comfort zone" and increasing my marketability down the road.

As for the MS world vs the Java/J2EE/Linux world: If you are a web solution developer the latter world makes a lot of sense. If you are an desktop/handheld app developer like me, C#/ .NET has a lot to offer.

-Chris