On Fri, Aug 17, 2001 at 11:51:42AM -0400, Chris Nandor wrote:
: In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Porter) wrote:
:
: > Chris Nandor wrote:
: > > In other words, a useful certification process is a fantasy one in a
: > > place where every day is sunny and the trees are made of candy.
: >
: > Not nearly so fantastic as the place where every PHB who needs
: > a Perl programmer can competently interview and hire one.
:
: Touche.
:
: However, like I said, my interests are mostly mine alone. I do not
: speak for business people. If someone wants to do certifications, as
: long as it doesn't affect me, fine. I will think it is silly, but
: whatever people want to do, they should do.
:
: But as soon as I am forced to take some exam just to get considered for
: a decent job is when I will start to get *really* annoyed, and annoying.
: So my bitching now is proactive. :-)
Heh :)
I recently was asked to take Brainbench tests to be considered for a
job. There were 5 I had to take: Unix Admin, Internet, Perl, PHP and
C. The first three were drops in the hat however, if I did have a
situation it wasn't anything a root terminal, Google or perl -e
couldn't handle. PHP and C on the other hand are languages that I am
not very familiar with. Before I took the test, I did about 7 hours
of reading; 4 hours on a K&R comentary[1] and 3 hours on the PHP
Online Documentation[2]. I also had a text editor, mod_php4 and gcc
at my disposal during the test. Given that I had a total of about 3
hours programming in either language, I passed fairly easily. Why did
I pass those tests? Because I can read and retain information, not
because I can program in PHP and C.
[1] http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/krnotes/top.html
[2] http://php.net/manual/en/
I also passed an NT Admin course in school by reading the book and
passing the tests, I never touched an NT Server. I don't ever want to
be an NT Admin but I passed the class so I must be a good NT Admin
right? nope.
Casey West
--
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates, 1981
