It's time for MCPD!

I feel the same way about these as I do about all certifications: useless. Certifications do not indicate mastery of a subject matter, merely of the certification exam. It is no accident that the worst developers I worked with often the most highly credentialed, and the best lacked any certs. Google has made memorization that is central to certification pointless. Furthermore, indoctrination in the "correct way", be it Microsoft, Cisco, or any other cert., fosters a perspective that falls somewhere between naive, incomplete, and dangerous.

I agree with you that the cert by itself does not mean much as you can be certified and you can be a mediocre developer. When I interview a job applicant, I don't care that much about his/her certifications. They are a good plus if everything else is OK, but nothing more.

The problem with certifications in my opinion is akin to the problem with grades in school. Most people study for the grades and not for the knowledge and this defeats the main purpose of the whole endeavor - to learn something new, to learn how to do things right and to remember some small part of it:) Perhaps "right" is an ambiguous word, but going through the exam material dilligently at least shows you what you shouldn't do. From my experience the most dangerous people are the ones that don't read and constantly reinvent the wheel thinking they've made a breakthrough.

I've been burned in the past when I hired employees based on their certs.

Just about every certified network specialist or developer I've met turned out to be a flake. My business partner and I have taken to calling them "paper MCSEs" and "paper MCSDs".

My company is a Microsoft Certified Partner and I recently completed a survey for big M where they asked how they could better the MCP program. I specifically highlighted the need to make the cert exams much tougher or to make them tiered and make the top level exams really tough. And for them to implement the type of problem solving questions (that they've promised to do for over 5 years) that can't have their answers "brain dumped" to the internet.

Lastly, I told them that they really needed to work on their "core curriculum". The MS Press books are almost always the worst at explaining a particular tech and even though a particular book may be on the recommended reading list for an exam, many times there's little or no info in the book that's actually relevant to the exam. They either need to improve their books or officially recommend books outside of MS Press when merited.

Yes, this would be really cool. If MS introduces a tiered system and makes it tougher to become an MCSD this would benefit both hiring companies and the MCSDs.

I guess this would be a logical step in light of what they are doing to the partner program to change it and make it more difficult to become a Certified or Gold Certified Partner. Too many MCSDs and Certified Partners just dilute the value of the status.