> a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago.

That's unfair. Don't tar everyone with vendor qualifications with the same brush. Many of us obtained them because the companies we worked for needed minimum numbers of vendor "qualified" staff to attain or maintain the various levels of partner status available. For example, I worked at a consultancy that needed to maintain a pool of Microsoft and Cisco qualified staff to maintain the levels of official vendor partnership (Gold was the top MS partnership back in the day, don't remember what the Cisco one was) that would keep opening doors at blue chips.