Salesforce certification: When certs matter, when they don't & what to look for

Certification programs for administrators and developers go back to the days when the mainframe was young, so it's not surprising to see analogous courses and tests showing up for CRM systems now. Certification is a sign of competency in one technology or another…sure.  But how important is certification, really?In technology infrastructure products (such as network or OS), certification might well be dismissed as a fairly static “checkbox item”.  But in applications