GitHub Certifications (Beta)

In fairness it is very clearly branded as a GitHub Certification, rather than a git certification, so its not like they're trying to hide it.

It is a way to commoditize people, and MS has been selling their certifications on 2 markets since forever :

- Employees : show your value by these certs and increase your potential wage.

- Employers : now you can easily compare potential employees ( driving down their wage )

I personally dislike tests that are multiple choice. It loads the mind with (sometimes obviously) false data that must be rejected and the ability to pattern match on word usage or even guessing between answers that haven't been eliminated means that the instructor never really knows if the person actually knew the answer and neither does the student.

When I used to participate in math contests I'd go out of my way not to read the answers before attempting to solve the problem because it's much more gratifying that to reverse engineer the problem from the input. In the end, I'd resort to that or guessing if I couldn't crack the problem on my own, but then at least I knew which problems I really solved and which ones I didn't. And when I was invited to do more complex math contests than the ones that Waterloo was putting out I was astonished at how much harder just having to write in an exact answer was, since you missed out on the "not one of the options" feedback if you flubbed a number somewhere.

With these certification tests it's impossible to really do the same thing. It doesn't even feel like real thinking compared to writing software or prose. Also the pointless memorization of things like "what classes of MITM attacks are there?"[0] don't really get a person to learn the stuff. It's like memorizing the atomic weight of elements. That stuff never stuck for me until I was doing real chemistry and the basic act of looking up a weight each time slowly got me to memorize the elemental weight of the chemicals I was working on. Same goes for all those French words I was forced to learn in Canada. Once I started wanted to speak Russian I was amazed at my ability to actually be able to remember words.

I'm not saying these things should never be tested. I wouldn't trust a structural engineer that didn't know what lateral torsional buckling is[1] but the manner in which we test it should be as close the reality we would expect, and this is what we do in engineering school most of the time.

[0] Answer: Surveil, Fabricate, Modify, and Deny.

[1] Essentially the concept that a tall but thin beam can swing to the side, or "torsionally buckle" when loaded from the top (thus requiring bracing) unlike a beam rotated 90 degrees, which does not require bracing for this reason.

I bet a majority of critics here have a Github account and work actively on the platform. The good news is that we still have the freedom of choice, so, take a step back and resume the control of your code and data. At least think about it.

Pushing bureaucratic certification is a step back in history and paves the way towards corporate centralization & exploitation.

Look out for alternatives, you can live well without Github stars for prestige and I hope also without Github certificates for your career. After all, Git was made for decentralization, I do not want Microsoft to dictate the future well-being of (professional) developers.

I've done one of the AWS certs a few years ago, found it was very much a memory test.

A lot of questions on easily Google-able things. I learned a lot from the training material, but don't think the exam itself really proves that much skill on the platform.

If I took the test again now, I doubt I would pass despite a lot more experience since I passed the first time around.