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| IMO you should aim for MCAD, as its requirements are a
subset of MCSD, which you can fulfill later on as you see
fit.
Why more MCSEs than MCSDs? I'd like to think that it was
due to difficulty, wherein you have to show knowledge of
more than one core discipline - however that's probably
only a very small part of it. If certification were
mandated by legislation (as for lawyers/accountants) we
wouldn't see a huge fall-off in the number of developers,
certification takes a good deal of work, but its not the
enormouse cerebral challenge some people would have us
believe. Certification for developers (as a hiring
criterium) probably ranks as a lower priority due to the
highly creative nature of development.
Most MCSDs get involved through a commitment to their
lifelong studies, and in no small part to keep themselves
honest. They read more than the editorial, they have
more than conversational awareness of software concepts,
and they actively participate in improving their skills
with more than mere lip-service.
Granted there are exceptions (paper-only types, braindump
users, etc.) but these rarely thrive when the chips are
down (i.e. in current economic conditions, or in a real
interview against a real techie)
Just keep your eye on this newsgroup for many examples of
the kind of dedicated people I'm talking about. And
occassionaly a few of the other kind ;-)
>-----Original Message-----
>I used to write a lot of code back in the mid-Nineties,
on
>a platform that was moribund even then. Then I moved
over
>to the same company's network administration group and
>didn't look back... my career went that direction. I
got
>an MCSE (and I got bored after 5 MCSE 2000 exams, but I
>may finish the other two soon) and worked my way up in
>that bailiwick to a respectably high position. Then we
>all got laid off and I went into business for myself,
>which is working out pretty well, as these things go.
>
>I'm bored, though. Small companies have extremely
simple
>problems and needs. I really wanted to get back into
>coding, figuring I could bolster my income with some
>custom applications-- I was a good programmer back in
the
>day and figured I could be again, although I'd have to
>finally figure out OOP (not nearly as big a deal as I
>thought it would be) and event-driven programming (not a
>big deal either, in fact, it's easier as you all may
know).
>
>So five weeks ago I bought an MS book that had a 60-day
>free trial of visual studio .NET and for the last week
>I've been working hard (almost feverishly) on a project
>that uses web services for database access. The curve
>felt awful steep at first but now everything seems to be
>falling into place.
>
>I think getting the MCSD (or maybe the MCAD only for the
>simple reason that my customers know what an application
>is but perhaps would find the word "solution" a little
>confusing!) might help me in my marketing. I have
noticed
>from what I'm reading, though, that not that many people
>are getting the cert, at least not by MCSE standards.
>There must be at least a 20:1 ratio. What I want to
know
>is, are there so few MCSD's because it's really hard
>(that's kind of exciting from a challenge standpoint) or
>because there's not that much advantage to it? I'd like
>to hear opinions on that so I can decide if it's worth
it
>to get one. I don't know a single MCSD, so this is the
>only place I can think to ask.
>.
>
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