Following up on my own post, just to be clear -- I think a certification
exam for web developers is impossible. And/or the fact that you know PHP
inside and out doesn't make you worth anything on a real project. You
can't reduce the breadth and complexity to a multiple-choice test. Such
a setup is too easily gamed.
What might be interesting would be some kind of jury system. If there
were a 4-ish person jury consisting of, I dunno, Steve Manes, Tom
Riemer, Jack Slocum, and Chris Corbyn , who would review a bunch of
"thesis-like" stuff you put together, and then hop on a chat and
interrogate you for an hour before saying "yeah, this guy/gal is pro or
slow" -- then I might pay attention to that, when hiring you.
So who wants to help recruit some recognizable names, and start selling
"shots" at such a cert. Maybe 3 or 5 $k to sit in front of the jury ...
I mean, you've got to pay these juries well. These are busy people.
-Tim
Tim Lieberman wrote:
Certifications about particular technologies are dumb, unless there's
a certain amount of built-in complexity that justifies them (or not,
but I don't know what Cisco certifications are like, etc). PHP is a
small enough system that it doesn't warrant it.
Any competent programmer can become satisfactorily proficient in a
language in less than two weeks (assuming the language is of a common
langauge class -- C to lisp is hard. Perl or C to php is simple.
Also see C++ to Java, PHP to ColdFusion, Java to C#, etc). Given two
or three months, that programmer who gained some proficiency can
become fairly expert.
If you want a certification, it should be wider.
As someone who's in a position to hire, I'd love to see a really
strong certification that I could count on. This would require
conceptual knowledge, not particulars about a language.
I want someone who can (among other things):
- Administer UNIX-like servers. Including some basic understaning
of package management, and also (especially?) compiling from source.
- Can at least make their way around a windows/IIS type system.
- Understands version control systems (for me, CVS + SVN, but you'd
probably need to understand VSS in the cert exam).
- Knows how to program. Understands how to optimize (and when).
Understands recursion.
- Has a good knowledge of object-oriented things. - Knows their
way around major design patterns (MVC, Singletons, Factories, and so on)
- Understands SQL -- you might be a PHP-expert, but if you're
writing bad SQL your app will suck (unless it eschews SQL entirely --
how often does that happen).
- Understands XML parsers.
- Understands some common XML-based standards (SOAP, RSS)
- Knows how to write a cron job that will actually work.
- Can manually interact with an SMTP server (via telnet)
Knowledge of PHP's syntax just simply pales in comparison to the
importance of this stuff. PHP is *easy* to learn if ... wait for it
... you know how to program your way out of a paper bag.
($bag.exit();? exit($me,$bag);? $this.parent = null;? ... maybe it's
harder than I thought ... getting claustrophobic!)
All this stuff (together) is hard to test for, and it's hardly an
exhaustive list. It's also just the start of the list that *I* want
-- some people might not care about version control, for instance.
But a much better place to start, IMO, is not a PHP certification, but
some kind of overall web-development certification.
I care a LOT more about a candidate having a good understanding of
relational databases than I do about them understanding PHP. I also
want my subordinates to be clear on good semantic markup, and have a
good, solid understanding of Javascript (these days).
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