<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>peterkelly</author><text>I think industry certifications are a mostly pointless idea. If I&amp;#x27;m looking at learning something, my criteria is &amp;quot;will this information still be relevant 10 years from now?&amp;quot; If the answer is no, I either don&amp;#x27;t bother with it, or I invest the minimum necessary effort to learn what I need to do to solve the problem at hand.&lt;p&gt;Technologies that certifications focus on tend to have a limited lifespan. I place &lt;i&gt;far&lt;/i&gt; more value on more general, conceptual knowledge that will be applicable to a multitude of implementations, mixed with some practical hands-on stuff. I&amp;#x27;ve gotten far more out of learning about things like relational databases, compilers, multi-threaded and message passing programming, distributed systems, and experience with a range of different programming paradigms than I believe could ever be gained from certifications. Focusing on generic topics like this is going to be far more valuable to your career in the long run.&lt;p&gt;If I see a company specifically looking for someone with a certification or experience with a particular library&amp;#x2F;framework, I take that as a sign that they don&amp;#x27;t fully appreciate the value that a well-rounded engineer can bring to the table. Furthermore, certifications have the effect of tying your advertised skill set to a specific vendor&amp;#x27;s products, and expect you to keep up to date every three years or so as they change the specifics of their training and certification requirements.&lt;p&gt;My company, a contracting firm, recently ran some AWS training sessions and offered to cover the costs of the exams for employee who wanted to do them. I went along to a couple of sessions but ultimately concluded it wasn&amp;#x27;t a good use of my time, relative to other things I could be doing to advance my career. While I&amp;#x27;m fortunate to mostly work for clients who understand that, I wish there were a wider appreciation of general knowledge rather than people investing themselves so heavily into skills that have a short lifespan and are tied so heavily to specific vendors and the current flavor of the month.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jasoneckert</author><text>As an IT college teacher for 21 years, I can tell you that educational institutions are very angry about this change. We often have courses that map to Microsoft certificaion. Students write them, and employers want them. They are a general benchmark that allows organizations to narrow the list of candidates they interview for a job related to one or more technologies. Most college grads get jobs in small-to-medium organizations where Azure is not a common requirement. Moreover, many small organizations that moved their stuff to Azure at the request of an MSP are current moving it back on premises to save cost now that they realize it&amp;#x27;s much cheaper to do so. Together with Microsoft&amp;#x27;s abrupt replacement of the Win10 certifications last year (they gave no notice to colleges or publishers), it looks like the trust colleges have placed in the Microsoft certification program is disappearing fast.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Microsoft is retiring its MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-retiring-its-mcsa-mcsd-and-mcse-certifications-in-june-2020/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>gerdesj</author><text>As an employer (IT consultancy), I in particular do not mark up for MS qualis.  I generally drop those to the bottom of the stack for lacking originality if that is nearly all that is shown in support.  I want to see things like engineering, maths and science degrees, actually any degree will do that shows critical thinking.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take a HND in palaeontology in preference to a MS fellowship with a signed photo of Bill G over their headboard any day.  At least I&amp;#x27;ll get someone who has legendary attention to detail and the ability to follow a chain of inferences and gather clues.  They&amp;#x27;ll also be able to completely piss on anyone who starts going on about their first PC or programming language as though that is some sort of ancient history.&lt;p&gt;Please Mr IT teacher:  Give me critical thinkers, not drones.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jasoneckert</author><text>As an IT college teacher for 21 years, I can tell you that educational institutions are very angry about this change. We often have courses that map to Microsoft certificaion. Students write them, and employers want them. They are a general benchmark that allows organizations to narrow the list of candidates they interview for a job related to one or more technologies. Most college grads get jobs in small-to-medium organizations where Azure is not a common requirement. Moreover, many small organizations that moved their stuff to Azure at the request of an MSP are current moving it back on premises to save cost now that they realize it&amp;#x27;s much cheaper to do so. Together with Microsoft&amp;#x27;s abrupt replacement of the Win10 certifications last year (they gave no notice to colleges or publishers), it looks like the trust colleges have placed in the Microsoft certification program is disappearing fast.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Microsoft is retiring its MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-retiring-its-mcsa-mcsd-and-mcse-certifications-in-june-2020/</url></story>