Vagmim,
Great analysis.
Opensource is all great, but still I hope you do acknowledge
the fact that big names like M$, Oracle, Sun (well.. now Oracle)
dominate the space as well. So certification is a value-addition
in some sense.
-D
On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Vagmi Mudumbai <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi Mathivanan,
>
> You should first understand how certifications work from the
> perspective of a vendor who offers such certification say Microsoft,
> Redhat or SAP. The vendor has an economic interest in selling his
> product to a company. The company which buys a product (or a service
> in case of Redhat) wants to know if the product/service they buy can
> be used by people they are going to employ. This is where the
> brilliance of marketing sets in.
>
> They con the students and candidates in the job market that there are
> several jobs awaiting them if only clear the certification in their
> technology. They then go and talk to all the colleges and institutes
> like NIIT and convince them to market the certification and giving
> them the necessary materials to make it a course. They then contact
> book authors who fill in pages and pages with mind numbing facts about
> the technology. The institute in the meanwhile has started tailoring a
> course to and claims that it can get you from a dud to a certified
> professional in 3 months. As with any statistical distribution in a
> country with a billion people, a sizable few take up the
> certifications. The first few batches are always tough. Only the good
> guys clear the first 3 or 4 batches. But good guys like to share
> knowledge. So they share the dumps with the world.
>
> The vendor does nothing to oppose this as they need that pool of
> skills in the market. After they have got enough number of people with
> the piece of paper with the name of the vendor and a printed signature
> of the CEO/founder of the company, the marketing department gets busy
> making powerpoint slides. The slides have graph of stating the number
> of people who have finished the certification and how easy it would be
> for their customers to find the right skills. And since the numbers
> (supply) are aplenty and the licensed customers are a few (demand), by
> the laws of economics, they should have no problem in finding people
> with the right skills (and a cheap pay).
>
> The mindless HR then goes and "recruits" people with certifications.
> So if you notice, if you are a good candidate, you can lower your
> value just by getting certified. There are alternative means to
> improve your employability. You can start contributing to open source
> for a start. Do not pick difficult projects. If you cannot find a
> project, try building something. Try creating a simple webapp or a
> game. I am seeing too many freshers with "Biometric AI-Driven Neural
> Network Enabled Grid Based Path Finding World Domination Engine" on
> their resumes. And they want me to believe that they did it in 3
> months without being able to write fizz buzz in their favorite
> language.
>
> As an employer myself, I would recommend you to do the following. Take
> up a small project. A small pong game or a simple webapp that solves
> your problem and document all your learnings in a blog. This will make
> you a better writer and a better programmer. Use open source
> technologies. Apart from being the best choice in terms of freedoms
> that you get, you also get to interact directly with better
> programmers in mailing lists like these.
>
> To pioneer a change, I, on behalf of Artha42 (http://www.artha42.com),
> am ready mentor a select group of students every year. Your work will
> be entirely open sourced. I promise that you will not write a single
> line of proprietary code. That said, we are not google. We are a small
> startup with limited resources. We cannot hold something as large as
> the Google Summer of Code. But we can do something smaller. If you are
> interested in such an internship opportunity, do drop in a line to
> careers <at> artha42 <dot> com.
>
> Regards,
> Vagmi
>
> http://blog.vagmim.com
>
> “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
> make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the
> other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
> deficiencies." C.A.R. Hoare.
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