From: gregarican <greg.kujawa@...>
Date: 2005-11-04T02:22:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Certification

Peter Hickman wrote:

> Certification tends to get pushed as a 'good thing' by people selling
> certification or by programmers who don't have the skills. There are
> companies who will certify Perl programmers, which was news to myself
> and many, many Perl programmers. None of whom are certified.

The idea of programming certification seems a stretch for me to imagine
as well. And I come from an sysadmin from back when Novell
certification started becoming a measuring stick in the early 1990's.
Only to be replaced by the dreaded MCSE certification from Microsoft.
The market got so saturated with "paper MCSE's" that the title
eventually became meaningless. Then once Linux started catching on all
of these Red Hat Certified Engineer training programs starting popping
up.

Someone who takes collegiate courses and earns a degree in computer
programming should be judged based on such qualifications. Someone who
hasn't earned a degree in such a field could be judged on sample code
from their projects they have contributed to. If the sample code is
owned by a former employer then some other self-maintained portfolio
could be presented.

To me I think that certifications are just tangible life-preservers
that PHB's performing interviews are looking for to help them out. It
reminds me of my first boss at a computer manufacturing plant. He had
over ten years worth of hands-on experience using everything under
God's creation and had memorized practically every factoid one could
imagine. But he couldn't pass any certification exams that the company
paid for. Then he hired someone who had just come out of a tech
training school with a certification. That guy could barely turn on a
computer since he had no hands-on experience...