Re: [Boston.pm] Certification
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
RE: [Boston.pm] Certification
First, I would like to compliment and express broad general agreement with everything James Freeman said in his response to the following message. Second, I would like to express specific agreement with Adam Turoff's expression of the crux of the problem. Expressing agreement takes much less typing than expressing an opinion. Now, to address Greg's message below... From: Greg London Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 11:10 PM Subject: [Boston.pm] Certification 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? A. I must point out that logic is irrelevant. Briefly: + People are not logical. + Gödel. If logic were the answer _here_, then the answer to a manager consider using Perl would be a logical argument based on the application, not waving a certification in his face. The manager is not logical, and neither is anyone else. The goal is for people and their arguments to be rational, not logical. B. My contention that certifications are socialist is only FUD if you are afraid of socialism, uncertain as to what it is, or in doubt of the same. Your own cry of red scare seems to be less of a logical argument against my assertion than an attempt to make people think of Joe McCarthy. Perhaps you are not aware that there were communists spies working in the US. You further seem to be conflating Soviet communism with socialism. But this is hardly the place for a history or social sciences lecture. C. You say that the anti-certification people fail to address the specific case you present. This is somewhat of a cheat, as you are only now presenting your specific case, so obviously no one could have addressed it beforehand. But I'll gladly address it. C.1. If you are a programmer who thinks Perl is the right answer, and your manager thinks Perl is the wrong answer, and few or none of your coworkers think you are right, then you are wrong. Why? Because it does not matter what the technical merits of a language are if no one understands the language and can manage the risks associated with that language. If your coworkers dont know Perl, then you being certified will not help them know Perl. If your manager does not understand the risks associated with picking a given Perl version or set of Perl features to use, then you being certified will not help him know that. C.2. If you are a spiffy junior programmer who knows all about how great Perl is and thinks your coworkers are silly for using Java, C#, C++, and so forth, then you need more experience with things other than Perl. Perl certification will just signal your narrow-mindedness. C.3. If you are an experienced programmer, with coworkers who know Perl quite well, and you are validly correct that Perl would be better than the choice your manager wants to make, and your manager does not care what you say, then you have a social problem with your manager and you should consider employment elsewhere. Perl certification will not prevent you from having poor social skills or working for a jerk. How'd we get from Perl-Certification-Manager-Accepts-Perl to the four horsemen of the friggen apocolypse??? It happened in your mind when you built your straw-man. 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. Perhaps you were in the wrong class. You seem to be thinking of the debate club. 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
Re: [Boston.pm] certification
Bogart Salzberg wrote: How about an intermediate step: self-testing. Others have already mentioned Brainbench. 3 or 4 years ago I actually saw a few Perl programmer resumes with Brainbench certifications listed. I'm sure if a bunch of Perl people wanted to write a better test, Brainbench would be happy to administer it. It would be a start, though I'm not so sure that Brainbench's web-based, open book tests are close enough to a certification to have the intended effect. Uri Guttman writes: ...[the Brainbench] test is worthless. i took it when it was free and without trying got a very high score. In the early days of Brainbench I took a test on JSP that they had as a free beta test. Not knowing anything about JSP I took it with the test open in one browser window and a JSP FAQ open in another. I scored in the top 5% or something like that. -Tom ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] certification
On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 15:39, Tom Metro wrote: As others have argued on the list, as programmers we know certifications are pointless as a technical qualification, but we're not the audience that needs to be convinced otherwise. I disagree. A certification says that you have a certain baseline of knowledge about a subject. The fact that people routinely mis-use certifications as a means to judge _applicable skill_ with some toolset whose knowledge is tested in the certification process is NOT the certification's fault. If you came to me and said, I have a certification in X, but have no other exposure to it, I would place your resume in the pile above the people who have not encountered X and below those who have used it for real work (assuming that the certification is one that I know and at least superficially trust). If, on the other hand, two experienced people applied and only one was certified in X, I would consider them to be equal and let in-interview factors decide. I would never let certification trump experience. Treated this way, certifications are a useful measure of how much ramp-up someone is going to have on a given technology, but NOT how good they are at using it. -- 781-324-3772 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ajs.com/~ajs ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] certification
Tom Metro wrote: It would be a start, though I'm not so sure that Brainbench's web-based, open book tests are close enough to a certification to have the intended effect. A self-testing program *need not* suck. Here are four reasons why a home-grown testing program would be (could be) better than Brainbench, followed by an (improved) argument for a bottom-up approach to boosting Perl: 1. Paradigm. Multiple choice tests are for geography. *Writing Perl scripts* is the stock-in-trade of a Perl programmer, so why not test scripts? 2. Fun. Brainbench, like a sterile cinder-block high school classroom, is no fun. But when the test-writer and the test-taker are peers (in their love of Perl), the challenge can become a sporting endeavor. We love puzzles, right? The testing environment can be transformed from a student-vs-teacher to a sort of parlor game for geeks. 3. Inclusive. Wiki has its sandbox. Perl-test could have a sandlot. Bring your tennis shoes and an old worn-out copy of the Camel and step up to the plate. That is, take a test and/or write a test at no cost. No one with horn-rimmed glasses will be checking your student ID. 4. Quality. The Brainbench tests are limited in scope and change rarely, I would guess. (No 'demonstrable evidence' on this list, please :-| ). If a Perl self-testing program is to succeed, it would have to have the same kind of self-supporting energy that, for example, this list has. If it's fun and inclusive, interest will lead to quantity and quality. (Perhaps a user feedback system or loose-knit moderation could champion the best tests). I'm conceding that this self-testing program could not substitute for a certification program. But I still believe it could be part of a strategy to create and sustain buzz about Perl from the bottom-up. -Bogart ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
