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Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

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Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#51

Post by igrekel »

My personal uneasiness with certifications is partly due to the fact that so many people in IT organizations were fired without credentials. There are technical or college or even graduate degrees in subject related to what needs to be done in IT. It is just sad that after ignoring them for so long, they now turn to these commercial offerings who often don't focus on the real problems at hand in the sense that the problem is rarely technical.

That and also that several people (and I don't want to generalize because they aren't all like that) I have met with such certifications have belief that there is a "one true way" or recipe of doing things and are uneasy to adapt or step out of this course. Maybe it creates in these people the false conviction that there is an infallible answer to all problems.

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#52

Post by huhtenberg »

bfung wrote: post #26
derefr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a good certification process for developers? I can't think of a one I would hire based upon.

How about making the person taking the certification create working, readable programs, and have them submit their answers electronically. Like how programming assignments were in college, except without the rife copying between the participants. I think this test would weed out many people from the very beginning.

Back when I worked for a large networking hardware company, we tried it a couple of times. It didn't work, people cheat.

We asked to implement a splay tree container in C. Got back clean and working code, followed up with phone interviews, then brought these guys in (from another city) only to discover they didn't know what the offsetof() was. Even though it was used in the code they have submitted.

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#53

Post by randallsquared »

swombat wrote: post #21
gdp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're making one huge assumption here: that the certification actually certifies anything at all. As a matter of fact, it does not. Certifications are useless. Having or not having a certification is no indication of presence or lack of programming skill. Bet you're not a fan of driver licensing either, right? 'cause a driver license is no indication of the presence or absence of driving skill, either. Oh, wait, y…

Driving is a far simpler skill than programming. The fact is, most people in the world are capable of driving a car, after proper tuition. Most people in the world are incapable of developing quality software, after any amount of tuition. I think one huge problem with software engineering is that hardly anyone within the industry can even agree about what the "gold standard" should be. In those circumstances, it's ex…

Most people in the world are incapable of developing quality software, after any amount of tuition.

That's a very strong claim, unless your bar of quality is set very high.

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#54

Post by ilyak »

gdp wrote: post #25
swombat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving is a far simpler skill than programming. The fact is, most people in the world are capable of driving a car, after proper tuition. Most people in the world are incapable of developing quality software, after any amount of tuition. I think one huge problem with software engineering is that hardly anyone within the industry can even agree about what the "gold standard" should be. In those circumstances, it's ex…

OK, you've fundamentally mis-represented what I've said. You're talking about programming - I'm talking about certification of software engineering . They are two separate-but-related concepts. A certification should not be "Joe knows the syntax of language X according to some test" - it should be "Joe is familiar with this range of techniques that can be applied to produce higher-quality software". These are reasona…

You do not know how to produce higher-quality software. Me neither. But I just /know/ what MS would donate enough $$$ to certification whores to be sure they teach that "to produce higher quality software one should use a platform from The Trusted Vendor." You know, the one who makes "the other browserTM", as in "can you please try this in The Other Browser"?

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#55

Post by Sidnicious »

gdp wrote: post #20
huhtenberg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An anecdote. Back in late 90s I managed to get second best score in the country (for that year) in Visual Basic exam under Microsoft Certified Solution Developer program. The catch was that I had have never written a single line in Visual Basic nor had I have any substantial database development experience. So, yeah, it is entirely possible to get certified and not know a thing about a certification subject. Guy's go…

That's just an example of a bad certification process. Being able to provide an example of bad certification does not invalidate the entire concept.

"Who certifies the certifiers?"

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#57

Post by theli0nheart »

timwiseman wrote: post #36
derefr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of a good certification process for developers? I can't think of a one I would hire based upon.

I don't think you should hire on the basis of any certification, but they make an excellent flag as to whether someon should get the interview. Even in screening resumes it absolutely should not be your only deciding factor, but it is one good factor to look for when going through large stacks of resumes.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Programmers can learn to be great at what they do by _doing_. How many doctors do you think could learn what they know without going to medical school? None. This is why you must have an MD to practice medicine.

Programming has no barrier to entry. One of the only ways to see how well someone can write code is by actually looking at their code. There's no shortcut, for better or for worse.

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#58

Post by nathanb »

gdp wrote: post #22
nathanb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be ways to game the certification process by teaching the test. And there will always be talented, passionate developers who don't test well or don't see the need to memorize something that Google could reveal in a single search or who just think that the certification process is bollocks. Requiring certification would, it seems to me, make it more difficult to determine which developers to trust. J…

> And there will always be talented, passionate developers who don't test well or don't see the need to memorize something that Google could reveal in a single search or who just think that the certification process is bollocks. Any certification process that simply involved rote learning or which could be googled wouldn't be worth the paper it is written on. I'm certainly not advocating that. > Just because Joe has…

But this dumbness is transitive. If it's dumb for a company to make assumptions about a developer because he's certified, it's dumb for a client to choose a company based on the percentage of developers who are certified.

> Playing an averages game, that at least means that somebody in the company is going to know when corners are being cut, rather than just having a group of people hacking along.

My argument is that this is completely false. In fact, I suspect that there would either be zero correlation between cluefulnes and certification or actually a negative correlation. The reason for this suspicion is both from looking at certifications required for other disciplines and looking at the best developers I know, all of whom have little to no use for certifications and are too busy doing awesome stuff to bother with formality and process (yet whose code consistently has the fewest and least severe bugs and is the most unit-tested of any code in the repository).

There's certainly no question that a certification process could weed out maybe the bottom 5-10% of all developers if all professional software developers were required to take it. But the nature of software development is such that these developers are not the ones in danger of causing the collapse of civilization anyway. I would guess, and this is just my guess, that it's the ones who are in the top 50% but not in the top 10% who tend to wreak the most havoc: they have shown enough skill to be given important tasks, but due to time constraints or inexperience or whatever they make mistakes or cut corners.

Thus, if I were a client, I would be more interested in choosing a company or supplier that has a policy where any code checked in must be reviewed by at least one experienced developer. I'd be interested in making sure that they write repeatable automated tests and use code coverage tools to ensure that their tests are testing what they think they're testing. I'd be interested in making sure that they had a mentoring program that allows new hires to be taught by experienced developers. Any one of these things would put my mind at ease more than any certification process.

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#59

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

amalcon wrote: post #47
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO, that's what proper design & development process is for. Testing is only a (small) part of that process and as we've known for decades, you can't test quality into a product. Hell, just a few minutes ago, someone brought me a piece of code that has been HAMMERED on for the last nine months and it still has a bug that wasn't noticed until today! gdp is right: certifications are useful if they are rigorous, targeted…

When a pilot or a physician makes a mistake, there is no chance for someone else to correct it. That's why these professions (physicians especially) require expensive certifications, and continuing expenses to keep these certifications current. Engineers are probably a better comparison: while engineers do have expensive certifications, they aren't the ones doing most of the engineering. Instead, they're the ones ver…

So because there's a chance for someone to fix a bug is a reason that certifications are useless in software? Not buying it for a second. Whether or not the bug can be fixed is immaterial: it may have already caused thousands of $$ of problems even if fixed. Tell that to a business whose eCommerce site has been down for a day because of a dumb error by an inexperienced programmer.

As far as your comment about engineers being a better comparison and axod's comment that "most software is fun..." (WTF!!! do you think businesses expend millions of dollars yearly on IT so they can have "fun?"), I call bullshit! As someone with experience and in both hardware and software engineering, I can assure you that most engineering is verified by non-certified (I assume you mean PE's) engineers.

I live daily with software that has to work. Serious bugs are not tolerated in medical devices. The attitude that "oh, we can fix that in the next release, just tell the operator not to hit F8 before F7 or they'll misdiagnose the patient" simply doesn't fly around here.

Sorry for the rant, but attitudes like this are exactly why software development isn't taken seriously by most professions!

Re: Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate

#60

Post by zmimon »

synnik wrote: post #19

I've always said that certifications are a base level of competence for a job, not a proof of expertise. When a senior dev rants about how they don't need a certificate, I agree, but counter them with the question: If certificates are so easy to get and meaningless, why haven't you bothered to get them? Note: I can think of a number of reasonable answers why not... but their response to that question is often enlight…

> certifications are a base level of competence for a job

Unfortunately some of the certified people I've met have been so genuinely awful that I don't think you can even claim that. I tend to be with the article author on this one - people tend to get certified because they are unable to compete in other ways and want to bolster their resume.

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