Here, here...
The perl community already has a "certification" that matters and would convince any PHB that the person they were hiring was a good candidate. The Perl Advocacy question is a separate one for reasons I will show below. In short our current certification goes like this, hypothetically...
"My name is Tim Bunce and I wrote the DBI module, see: http://dbi.perl.org/, and the book Programming the Perl DBI. DBI is used on the following Fortune 2000 companies websites..... This framework is the standard for database access in the Perl community." I could go on but this is my point.
In the interview process what have I learned about Tim Bunce even if I don't know anything about Perl.
1) He is capable of creating world class software that has been voluntarily adopted by his community and used in real world business applications.
2) His communications skills are proved by the book and the book's utility can be shown by its sales.
3) He saw a hole in the market and wrote software to fill that hole and wrote it in such a way that it can be used by others and adopted as a standard in the community.
4) I have never met him but from all reports he has good personality and would probably be a pleasure to work with: see: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/alanbur/20040920
5) He did this entirely of his own initiative.
So am I confident that with a person like this on a project, regardless of the language choice, would be a great addition to any development team, and even better if it was Perl. Perl given its low barriers to entry becomes a natural meritocracy and Tim Bunce has reached the top of the heap. There are other examples in the community of course. This is a "certification" that really matters. This is the great thing about Open Source game in general good information about the best "players" move the best to the top naturally. Even if there was a certification process who would you rather hire a random certified Perl hacker or Tim Bunce all other things being equal? Would your precious time be better spent getting a certification or putting a fantastic module on search.cpan.org that handles a real world problem and extends the language into new areas?
Perl Advocacy:
Certification would not help Perl advocacy alone. Marketing Perl Requires Marketing. Java is marketed by Sun and C# is marketed by Microsoft, millions of dollars are spent making the decision makers that hire the technical staff think that language X (and its supporting software) is the future and all other languages are bad investments. >From the business point of view people are making the switch from Java to C# because (regardless of the technical facts which I am not arguing here) because they think Microsoft could buy Sun with the spare change on Bill's nightstand and Microsoft doesn't because they don't think Sun is a good investment.
In some decision making processes, the technical aspects of the decision is secondary to the cost of having an expensive future transition on Microsoft's schedule or having to defend your IT investments to the other business people who judge the value of the technical solution by the value of the business that represents that solution. On the technical end, given the right staff, all technical problems (based on language given that the language is kept up to date) are equal. The likely staff needed for the given language and the likelihood that the language will be kept up to date becomes the problem for the hiring manager.
Certification can give an inexperienced hiring manager the belief that he can treat the development staff he hires like interchangeable parts. Experienced hiring managers understand that the qualities that set Tim Bunce apart cannot be demonstrated by a simple certification. The bigger problem is does the hiring manger know that jobs.perl.org is a good place to find Perl developers? An ad like: "7000 experienced Perl developers read jobs.perl.org every week." in front of the hiring manager would be better use of the communities resources than a certification process.
The only benefit of the certification is to get your resume past the non-technical HR person's keyword based sorting of resumes. The nice thing about Perl without certifications is that the keyword is Perl not Perl Cert Version X. Starting down the certification path in a language means that you _must_ get the certification to get past the HR filters. This is to the benefit of the certification business, it adds to the expense in time and money to the individual developer, and once the certification becomes popular it can't be used to get your resume to the top of the pile. If you are planning to set up a Perl certification business I can't argue with your business model, but for the individual developer, not a good idea unless you have to. Your time is better spent finding a hole in the Perl offering and creating and publishing an excellent module that becomes a standard. Does this mean that if Tim Bunce doesn't get this certification his resume won't appear on the hiring managers desk, but some random guy will?
If the purpose of certification is to establish a floor on the persons ability as a Perl language lawyer and to make sure that this person updates their language lawyer skills a better alternative to certification is to make a public list of interview questions the technical manager should be able to get a good answer to (this is an interesting exercise in itself) . Al Stevens did this for C++ years ago in Dr. Dobbs and you couldn't get through a technical interview for writing C++ without knowing the answer to at least one of these questions, and they were damm good questions written by an expert in C++ who had done some hiring. I would welcome this list of questions and hope it got updated, and hiring managers would know what to ask to winnow out good candidates based on their Perl language lawyer skills. If you think that people will just memorize answers to these questions and parrot them back in the interview, that's exactly what a certification means. I would rather ask questions in the interview, and ask how they applied the answers in a real project.
The language update problem is actually the bigger problem for Perl Advocacy. Will the language be kept up to date? Because it is Open Source it cannot be stopped unless the development community loses interest. This is why the Perl 6 / 7, 8, etc. initiative is so important to the future of the language, moving the language forward will make the hiring managers understand that Perl is not likely to become abandonware. Marketing the language to developers and hiring managers is the key to the future of Perl, certification doesn't really move that ball forward, it is just a expensive keyword for a resume filter (MCSE anyone?).
Some important questions for the future of Perl and its mindshare:
Will the hiring manager be able to find good Perl developers and where?
Has that developer put any code on CPAN and is it any good (the REAL certification)?
Will the hiring manager be able defend Perl as a good business decision (will it be kept up to date and be the best low cost solution)?
Is becoming demonstrably good at Perl worth the opportunity cost vs. becoming good at other languages?
What are the weaknesses of Perl and how will they be addressed in the future?
How does Perl deal with the Elephant in the Room, Microsoft?
Can Microsoft cut off access to the client or make Perl based sites look bad or break? (Look at msn.com in Firefox under XP for example of how Microsoft specifically targets things it thinks are threats). Java handled that though JSP, how does Perl handle this?
How do you market these answers to the rest of the world?
Thanks for your time,
James
Greg London wrote:
I think I just figured out why this conversation is going nowhere.
The pro-certification folks think that certification would help convince a non-technical manager to use perl for a project. The programmers would determine that perl is the right language for the job on a technical basis. The manager would use a oijia board and certification to determine that perl is the best language to use for the job. And everyone would be happy.
It's a very specific condition. Programmers determine perl is the best technical language for job. Manager needs some non-technical convincing. Certification convinces manager. Everyone is happy.
Rather than address this rather specific situation, however, the anti-certification folks, denounce certification as communist (red scare anyone?), spread fears of total bifurcation of the entire Perl community, and warn of the zombie army of braindead programmers with Perl Certificates taking over the job market.
It's Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt at it's finest. You guys got Bill Gates and his Linux FUD beat hands down.
How exactly did logic get thrown out the window with this?
Perl certification won't find Bin Laden, so we shouldn't adopt it? Every person capable of running a perl training course is against certification, so there will be no way we can ever get anyone to teach a perl certification course? Cats and dogs will be sleeping together, the end of the world as we know it?
Come on, people. You've been trained to think logically. You all know the difference between empirical evidence and wild speculation, between hypothosis and scientific law.
What the hell happened here?
How'd we get from Perl-Certification-Manager-Accepts-Perl to the four horsemen of the friggen apocolypse???
It doesn't parse.
Just a refresher to those who were busy doing assembly programming during their logic courses: The person making the assertion is shouldered with the burden of evidence.
That means if you make a claim like "The perl community will split in two if certification is adopted", then it is up to you to provide the evidence and proof to support that assertion. Otherwise it is nothing but FUD. Simply saying it will split doesn't make it true. and starting with it as a premise is a logical error.
The only assertion I've made in favor of certification is that a manager who doesn't use the technical aspects of the languages to choose which language to use might be persuaded in favor of perl if perl certification were available. This seems to be true. It certainly seems safe to say that perl certification won't cause a manager to NOT choose perl. Therefore certification is at WORST, no worse than it is now, at best an encouragement for managers to select perl. This is a logically sound argument.
I am interested in hearing any logically sound arguments against certification, because I'm aware that I may have missed something. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, and that sort of thing. But if you're not making a logical argument, then all you're doing is spreading FUD.
All I've heard so far is logically equivalent to saying "Hitler required certification", and then the pro-certification folks get sucked into discussions of Nazism, when the whole thing is just a bunch of bullshit/FUD to stand as an obstruction to certification. Stopping certification at any cost, including sacrificing logic and an honest approach to the facts. To what end honestly, I don't know. Perhaps, you think of perl as you ultimate hacker's dream, unencumbered by the realities of politics, managerial decisions, and non-technical stuff like certification. I don't know.
But it's clear to me that what happened on this list would happen on a larger scale if certification were discussed at a national level. And that made me realize that I just don't have the energy to deal with that scale of bullshit, that enormous level of FUD, on the order of possibly tens of thousands of otherwise logical-thinking programmers suddenly succumbing to the fear that maybe the Earth isn't flat, maybe the Earth isn't at the center of the universe, and rather than look through someone's telescope, would rather fool themselves with smoke and mirrors that they would on any other occaision recognize instantly as a pile of stinking manure.
Just thinking about it makes me tired.
And so I withdraw, at least until as such a time that someone actually wants to engage in a logical discussion about certification.
But I'm done trying to convince the unconvincible. I'm done trying to apply logic to the illogical. I'm done trying to move the immovable.
Anyone who is vehement anything refuses to look through the telescope.
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