TechRepublic Article: "Are tech certs valuable or not?"

I normally do not repost articles and make teeny tiny blog posts (I have noticed a few bloggers who do that, and it bothers me), but I found a short article on TechRepublic called Are tech certs valuable or not? to be quite interesting.

The author did an informal poll of a few CBS interactive higher-ups, and it was interesting to note that in addition to the expected "it depends" and "experience is the most important thing" and "beware the person with many certs and no experience" answers, the MySQL certification was specifically noted as being good:

Doug Lane, Director of Site Reliability and Performance Engineering, says, “The MySQL DBA certifications are valuable to me, since we support so many instances of that. Frankly, the Java and MS certs became less valuable due to the number of those who were just paper certified but not actually practitioners.”

Interestingly, he says the reason the MySQL certifications are valuable is because CBS interactive supports so many instances of MySQL, but he implies that folks who have MySQL DBA certifications also have experience (as opposed to Java/MS certs).