Big companies and government hire armies of cheap contractors to do the grunt work that keeps the company growing.

A tax collector doesn’t want creative programmers. They want a repeatable process that meets their procurement rules. They may even deliberately choose to make sure that nobody knows how everything works! They boil down a process into functional components, and hire cheap labor to fill in the blanks.

When you’re paying a body shop $40 an hour to have someone move across the planet to sling J2EE or whatever, you’re getting what you pay for. (Remember the contractor would probably get a raise working the night shift at Taco Bell) These certifications boil down to a third party attesting that you sat down somewhere and wrote hello world. In that market, it is valuable.