From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-11-04T03:37:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Certification

In article <8bf510930511030841n1dce715al510f95b3ff0607c9@mail.gmail.com>,
Obie Fernandez  <obiefernandez@gmail.com> wrote:
>Assuming we're on the verge of a big boom in Ruby jobs, shouldn't
>there be a place where employers can verify a candidates reputation?
>I'm thinking a testimonial or trust-based system of some sort.

Maybe these employers should look at things like ruby-talk particpation, 
projects listed on Rubyforge and in the RAA, blogs and articles written 
by the candidate.

>
>When the market for Java programmers exploded there were huge numbers
>of highly (un)qualified people getting hired to do Java and causing
>all sorts of grief to everyone involved. Lots of them had (or claimed
>to have) certification.

Let's look at it from a  different angle: when Java really 'hit' 
there were very few people that had more than a year's worth of Java 
experience (many had far less).  Since the employers wanted to use Java 
for their project (probably based on Sun's hype more than anything) they 
put themselves in the situation of needing to train Java programmers on 
the job (how else would people get significant experience with Java other 
than on-the-job?).  Can one really expect to find an experienced pool of 
Noo_lang programmers prior to significant industry adoption of Noo_lang?  

The only way for this to happen is if Noo_lang was used in open source 
development prior to industry adoption - we could say that this is the case 
with Ruby.  

Ruby's adoption by industry is probably going to look a lot different than 
Java's adoption.  Ruby's adoption is likely being driven more from the 
bottom-up, while Java's adoption was primarily driven from the top-down.

Phil