Re: Perl Certifications ??
by davorg (Chancellor) on Mar 05, 2001 at 19:11 UTC
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Brainbench have just started to charge for taking their
tests - so I suspect they'll see a bit of a drop in the
people taking them.
Larry has gone on record as saying that he'll be
certifiable before Perl is, but that hasn't stopped Kirrily
Robert from starting a perlcert mailing list. I'd give you
subscription info, but it doesn't seem to be on the list
of Perl-related mailing lists at
lists.perl.org. It's
been quiet for months tho' - perhaps it's defunct now.
--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>
"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me
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(jeffa) Re: Perl Certifications ??
by jeffa (Bishop) on Mar 05, 2001 at 20:16 UTC
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I am going to go out on a limb here . . . I think the
problem with Perl Certifications runs parallel with
using Perl as an 'enterprise language.' I am not saying
Perl can't be used as one - I am just saying that the
certifications allow interviewers to 'weed-out' candidates
in large 'enterprise' projects. Let me elaborte:
Everybody knows that a certification can only test so much,
real world experience is much more desireable, and
certifications simply turn coders into plugable components.
A manager in such large projects does not have time to
rigoursly interview each and every candidate - but by relying
on certifications they can weed out a large number with
confidence that they still have a good handful of capable
programmers/adminstrators.
Certifications also make 'consulting' shops look good. It
is worth the shops money and time to pay for their employees
to get futher certifications, because when the sales guys
shop out the programmers to a client, they can point at all
those certifications and look good.
I have 3 certifications: 2 MicroSoft and 1 Sun. They are
collecting a good bit of dust right now. :)
Jeff
R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--
L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--
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Those certifications you have from MicroSoft and Sun... they are blessed by the organizations mentioned.
Nobody's gonna take any Perl certification serious unless Larry blesses it. And Larry already said he's not going to bless any. Get over it. {grin}
Having said that, if Stonehenge comes up with a decent model for certification, and I take it to Larry, he'd at least listen. It's been down a ways on my to-do list for some time now.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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my $foo = "bar\n";
undef $/;
chomp $foo;
A) bar\n
B) bar
C) bar\r
D) ba
Jeff
R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--
L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--
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I would make a test where the questions are not multiple choice, but essay type. Write a module to do this... Also people would then get high scores for creativity
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I would vote for the Perl Foundation. They seem more appropriate. Most of the profits could then be the source of Perl grants. Sounds like a great way of raising money and helping Perl development. Not to mention that having an official certification helps Perl in many other important ways.
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Re: Perl Certifications ??
by rrwo (Friar) on Mar 06, 2001 at 22:30 UTC
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Certifications are very controversial.
In terms of Perl (and other open source projects), there's no "official" certifying organization
the way states will certify engineers, or the way companies
will certify users of their products (ie, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc.).
And assuming a respected third party does certification
tests, there are still lots of problems:
- Biggie: tests primarily test for test-taking ability. Often
people with little or no experience study and do well on a certifying test. Do you
want "Perl certified" people working on your project, or people with years of experience
working on your project?
- Certification for different modules? (CGI, DBI, Text::Template, Parse::RecDescent, etc.)? Ok,
if you have DBI certs, do you also need Oracle certs to use DBD::Oracle?
- Certification for Perl in different environments? (Win32? Solaris? Linux? mod_perl? fast_cgi?)
- Software evolves. You'll have to keep paying somebody to recertify you for everything every couple
of years. A lot of wasted time that could be spent using and learning the actual systems.
So you can tell I'm anti-certification.
What to use in place? Go to training courses and conferences. That's a better way to
demonstrate you've been keeping yourself up-to-date on the technology.
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