There was a time (early 2000s) where certifications where all the rage and by far the easiest way for otherwise 'mediocre' employees to stand out from the crowd to get hired and/or a raise. A couple of places I worked had formalized systems tying raises to passing certifications. Several people I know got hired for their job in tech purely on the back of passing their Microsoft developer certification.
I’ve worked at a certain company maintaining Linux servers and POS systems for retail stores across the country. The AD admin was MS certified and apparently among the certification materials they used to recommend companyname.local as the AD TLD. Meanwhile one of our software suppliers pulled samba which pulled avahi.
It became a big headache at first and then we had to adjust all our image build process to avoid the collision between the domain and multicast DNS libraries.
Microsoft certifications back then, yes, practice hard enough I recognised the shape of the question text, and knew what the answer was! Past exams had the same
questions as current at that time.
