“I think too many people are hired based purely on buzzword bingo: i.e. the applicant knows the right acronyms or has them listed on his/her resumé.”

I think many times the signal, this guy can program worth a crap, gets lost in the noise, “MCSD certified”. Certifications should be something that a developer uses to augment his already awesome resume, not the sole thing relied on by HR departments to make disjointed interviewing and hiring decisions. I think if you set certification up as your gate to an interview, you are going to miss out on a lot of quality potential hires.

What I definitely was not saying is that frameworks are worthless. I like other agile minded folks hate re-inventing the wheel. I would much rather figure out how to use something like Yahoo Pipes to leverage something someone else built than to write the 5 millionth GPS to zip-code service.