Certifications were the MOCs of their day. They were good for motivating and organizing your study of a topic. Unfortunately, while MOCs tend to stick to knowledge with proven value, certifications indoctrinate you into the ideas underlying the issuing company's technology, even if it is dubious and unproven. For instance, at the turn of the century, Sun's programming certifications were all about their Java Enterprise ideas that now we're all quite happy to have left behind. I took the Java Certified Web Developer exam way back in 2001 or so, and while it did cover fundamentals of HTTP and cookies and a little bit of the state of web security for the time, most of it was about Sun's ridiculous (in hindsight) web technologies like JSP.

The way the content of the exams came about was, Sun's super smart engineers thought really hard about questions like, "How can we build enterprise-scale software predictably and reliably in the future?" They came up with some ideas that seemed self-evidently true, turned them into a design orthodoxy, built massive technologies and frameworks to enable/enforce them, launched it with a tidal wave of marketing that is hard to imagine now, published hundreds of pounds of books, and created a system of certification exams all before getting enough experience with the technology to realize, "Gosh, we thought this would be a good way to build enterprise systems, but it really isn't." If you got a Java enterprise certification around the year 2000, it largely consisted of indoctrination into ideas that were about to be tossed into the dustbin of history.

At the time, I would have taken any job I got, and getting more Sun certifications like their Enterprise Architect certification (which meant you could explain why EBJ 1 was a really great idea) seemed like a good way to make myself more employable, but luckily for me, shortly after completing the Web Developer certification I got a job unrelated to enterprise Java, and I escaped further investment in that world.