I've read a lot about the issue of acquiring certification in things like .NET, Java etc. and I wanted to gather thoughts from people on this forum.
Proponents suggest that certification can provide a way of demonstrating a minimum amount of knowledge in a given technology. There appear to be three situations where it helps:
1. You're a novice developer and you want to use it to compensate for a work record you haven't yet established.
2. You're an experienced developer and you want something to help motivate you to learn more about a technology you may already be using.
3. You're trying to demonstrate a minimum technical competence in a given technology for a recruiter or client who doesn't know much about the technology.
There are a lot of people who are very skeptical about certifications. They point out that the whole process often doesn't reflect 'real world' learning. They almost invariably comment that certifications mean little compared with past work experience.
But speaking as an experienced developer I've observed some troubles with interviews. Beginning with past experience, if you work in a corporate setting, you can't talk much about your past work anyway so there's little way interviewers can figure out your technical competence or your relative contribution. If we talk about references, there are laws that help limit what they can say and few people are going to supply references that don't provide a rosy picture. Sometimes the interviewers have favourite pet questions they think will help identify the technical competence of another developer. Yet the lack of a standard set of community pet questions makes it difficult to show whether a typical programmer should know or not know something. If we talk about coding tests, they are usually done under conditions that don't match the work place. In my own experience, the tests have to be short enough to do in about an hour but complex enough to provide a variety of solutions that could differentiate candidates. It seems the big favourite is to really focus on efficiency - which in many cases is not the most important aspect of coding large-scale applications. Finally we get to contributions to open source projects... I think I overestimated the value of my own O.S. efforts in an interview. The clients simply rolled on with an interview style that assumed I was a black box programmer. I did average on their other interview aspects and later found out they didn't even look at the project pages, let alone documentation or code. Anyway enough of my observations, I'd like to hear yours.
You're an interesting group because you're all contractors. Have you found that certification has helped you in any of the three situations I've outlined above? Or have you felt the costs outweigh the benefits?
Proponents suggest that certification can provide a way of demonstrating a minimum amount of knowledge in a given technology. There appear to be three situations where it helps:
1. You're a novice developer and you want to use it to compensate for a work record you haven't yet established.
2. You're an experienced developer and you want something to help motivate you to learn more about a technology you may already be using.
3. You're trying to demonstrate a minimum technical competence in a given technology for a recruiter or client who doesn't know much about the technology.
There are a lot of people who are very skeptical about certifications. They point out that the whole process often doesn't reflect 'real world' learning. They almost invariably comment that certifications mean little compared with past work experience.
But speaking as an experienced developer I've observed some troubles with interviews. Beginning with past experience, if you work in a corporate setting, you can't talk much about your past work anyway so there's little way interviewers can figure out your technical competence or your relative contribution. If we talk about references, there are laws that help limit what they can say and few people are going to supply references that don't provide a rosy picture. Sometimes the interviewers have favourite pet questions they think will help identify the technical competence of another developer. Yet the lack of a standard set of community pet questions makes it difficult to show whether a typical programmer should know or not know something. If we talk about coding tests, they are usually done under conditions that don't match the work place. In my own experience, the tests have to be short enough to do in about an hour but complex enough to provide a variety of solutions that could differentiate candidates. It seems the big favourite is to really focus on efficiency - which in many cases is not the most important aspect of coding large-scale applications. Finally we get to contributions to open source projects... I think I overestimated the value of my own O.S. efforts in an interview. The clients simply rolled on with an interview style that assumed I was a black box programmer. I did average on their other interview aspects and later found out they didn't even look at the project pages, let alone documentation or code. Anyway enough of my observations, I'd like to hear yours.
You're an interesting group because you're all contractors. Have you found that certification has helped you in any of the three situations I've outlined above? Or have you felt the costs outweigh the benefits?
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