I say Sabotage. I'm presently a NOC engineer at an IT managed services provider. Before, I worked for a well-known financial market data provider. The most demanding client we have is a financial company. Everyone once in a while, they get unhappy with our service for whatever reason and decide to blast the blame-thrower. During the most recent hissy-fit episode, they threatened to not renew the service contract. Moreover, their CIO dropped in on the conference call and said not only are they not gonna renew the contract but he was gonna have us blacklisted with other financial companies that we were looking to grow business with. It's been my general impression that financial clients tend to be some of the most high maintenance, demanding, and nasty assholes. I've a hunch that a similar reason could be a factor In explaining this network engineer's actions.

A Cisco certification is useful for someone who needs to pick up practical skills immediately and become useful in a job right away. This Stanford course, however, is probably more useful for someone who's been in the industry for sometime and wants to understand networking on a deeper level.