Ah, yes... the "paper tiger". While I do have certs myself, it's only because my employer has required them. Left to my own devices, I would never bother. I've

Ah, yes... the "paper tiger". While I do have certs myself, it's only because my employer has required them. Left to my own devices, I would never bother. I've been in IT for almost 20 years and I agree that the "no cert/no degree" guys usually work out. The team lead whose feet I studied at in my first few years in IT had a high school diploma and he could run rings around the guys from Carnegie Mellon and RIT that worked with us. He was a deep diver mentally. I watched this guy drop awk, sed, bash strings a mile long, write Perl scripts without consulting a single web page. He knew iOS (Cisco), Perl, TCL/Tk, Sun, BSD, and about everything else. He could configure a HA UNIX servers and Oracle DB backends without consulting a manual. It was most impressive. He was let go because he was a team lead (middle manager). The people that replaced him--yes, people-- knew nothing in comparison.