I should grad with a four year degree here shortly. I have about one year work experience in systems development for Microsoft. I was curious if I should shell out the money to get certified by M$ or Sun? Are the pay differences bigger and that kind of thing? I’m particularly interested in developing Java.
Some places hire because of certs;
Some places will NOT hire because of certs.
It is a bit of a gamble. 
But generally all in all, they are worth it. If you have a good amount of experience in computing any ways the overall tests should not be that hard and you will be able to get away with just taking a test-prep course for most of the certifications.
You can also ‘find’ copies of pretests for various certifications online, tests that are otherwise identical in format and question type to the real thing but that score your answers in real time and let you see in what areas you need to study more. Handy that.
There is a company that sells the answers to the microsoft cert tests, verbatim. I will not post it here, because we have enough Paper MCSE’s in the field as it is.
Many companies will only hire you if you have a cert. Mostly contract companies, like the one I work for. Im not talking about temp services here, but long term companies that contract for the IT services for big companies. They get to charge more for certs, so they require them. Also, when a manager goes to hire people, and he has no clue what to look for, he goes for the cert. I have mine, but I also have a metric crapload of experiance to back it up. A cert will get you in the door sometimes, but you better be able to back it up, or you wont last long.
I’m MCSD and SJCP (Sun/Java) certified. Most employers/recruters I’ve mentioned it to seem unimpressed, indifferent. Perhaps because of the number of paper MCSEs/MCSDs out there.
The quality and usefullness of certs vary greatly. Here’s my take on a few.
A+ This is so simple, if you’ve been around computers for any time, that the question would be “How come you don’t have it?” for a company that expected it. I’ve known 16 year kids that get it just for the kick of having a cert.
MSCE Absolutely worthless in principal. The questions are readily available ahead of time. A lot of “paper tigers” out there. But in Dilbert world, this is sometimes required. MS knows this but lets it go on because they view certs as a branch of their marketing department.
Ciscos: CCNA means you know what IP addresses are and the router OS syntax. Not worth much. But CCNP requires knowing a lot more. Quite respected cert. Too bad the jobs aren’t there anymore.
Oracle. Sort of like MSCE but since there are so many clueless idiots that claim Oracle skills on resumes that companies require it to filter those losers out.
Redhat. Costs real $, respectable and all. I just don’t see a job market for it out there.
Sun Java. (One that I have.) Not a single person who interviewed me had ever heard of this. Ergo, a waste of time and money IMHO. (I am especially peeved that the cert. list, Sun’s own cert. study book, and the actual test are all quite different. The test questions are also poorly phrased and thought out. A college prof running a test like this would get called in for a chat with the Chair.)
In short, there’s a lot of pointy-haired bosses out there. Never underestimate their stupidity. They love it if you have a worthless cert and don’t care about the truly significant ones.
Job chances wise - you never know, see the posts above.
Knowledge wise - I personally found the certifications (I’m MCSE+I and MCSD) quite “worth it”. Getting ready for the exams makes you familiarize yourself with product features that you never worked with before (and prolly never would), makes you learn some of the scenarios you never encountered in the field, and generally makes your knowledge of the product more systematic (is that a word?).
And there’s no such thing as extra knowledge. Just ask Cecil. Anything that motivates you to sit down with a hefty volume of “Resources” and read up is good for you, period.
On a side note, throughout the 20+ Microsoft exams that I took, I did encounter a case or two when the right answer as presumed by the exam did not match the actual behaviour of the product as confirmed by lab tests. But 99.9% of the time, hands-on experience is your best bet.
I’d say the value of the cert varies greatly with the skill level of the interviewer(s).
Around this shop, certs frankly don’t mean spit. When we bring you in for an interview there’s first the HR interview (Here’s what we do, here’s the benefits, etc.) and then there’s the tech interview.
For the tech interview, they gather as many of us geeks as are available, place you, the interviewee, in the middle and we grill you. “How would you do this? What’s the process for that?”
Part of the tech interview is to find “your edges”. The other part of it is to guage sense of humor, response to stress, etc. We’ve had interviewees lie outright or make up answers rather than admit that they didn’t know. They usually don’t get the job. Because the tech interview is designed to find out what you know, in a job-specific set of questions, we don’t pay attention to certs.
The place where certs come in handy is when you get what I call the “Barbara Walters Interview”. This is where the interviewer doesn’t have a technical clue and ask you questions like “What is your greatest weakness” (like I’ll tell you) and “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” Certs are all that these people have to go on and they can be used to sell yourself.
Microsoft Certs, IMHO, are becoming worthless - too many people with no real world experience but still certified.
$.02
I am currently on a hiring committee and in our shop we don’t look at the certifications at all. The only place where I have EVER worked where it was useful to get hired was an MS solutions provider and they were required to have a certain percentage of people who had been MS certified.
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