From: Dave Aronson Date: 2012-12-27T12:40:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Sean Alphonse wrote: > Not to say I'm literally coming out of a factory and all, but if I was > an employer, I'd like to know what I'm getting. A certification can > still provide someone with a standard to gauge a person's abilities. The problem is, even at the same level of scoring on a certification exam, people are not fungible. Suppose Joe Shmoe and John Doe both score 70% on a Rails certification exam. Joe might have missed 30% for, e.g., not being familiar with testing, caching, AJAX, ORMs, etc. John might have missed 30% for just plain not knowing Ruby and/or Rails very well at all, though he's done a good bit of similar techniques in another language and/or framework. Which one is the right one to hire? By score alone, it's a tie. In reality, though, an employer may have good reason to prefer one over the other. If he can see their Github repos, they might have some better judgement, and conclude e.g. "John doesn't know Rails well, but he's done all this similar stuff in other tech stacks, and should be able to pick up Rails in a snap". They'll also see "Joe uses meaningless names and inconsistent indentation, his commit notes are useless, and his replies to issues look like he's a jerk". -Dave -- Dave Aronson, the T. Rex of Codosaurus LLC, secret-cleared freelance software developer taking contracts in or near NoVa or remote. See information at http://www.Codosaur.us/.