I never went through Human Resources :)

I got my first job when I went to a company that sold Atari computers to buy from them an Editor/Assembler cartridge for the Atari 800. They were also selling Altos business computers and they wanted someone to help them with sales, they thought that if I wanted to buy that cartridge then I did know about microcomputers and microprocessors. I wasn't really interested in business computers or selling them but they did have lots of Atari software I could play with, I thought that could be fun so I took the job.

Their main focus was to sell 8 bit Altos computers running M/PM, a multiuser version of C/PM. I really didn't care much about those computers, but a few months later Altos introduced the Altos 586, a 16 bit computer running Xenix. I had bought a copy of the "C Programming Language" a couple of years before and that was the first time I could get my hands on a machine with a C compiler. From then on I spent all my time playing with that computer, 7 days a week, writing C programs and learning all I could about Unix. The Altos 586 turned out to be a very popular computer, we sold many of those, and I became well known in the local computer industry as the Unix & C guru. From then on, people who have offered me a job have always been people who know me and know what I can do, so the certification has never been and issue.