Re^3: Perl Certification revisited

[gwadej]

While I understand your point, I still don't like software certifications for a couple of reasons.

Your staircase example covers one. Certifying builders is possible because we have thousands of years of experience in what makes good buildings. Also, the number of different ways to solve a given building problem are finite and well understood. Software is not in this category. Just in my career (about 2 decades), I've seen major changes in what was possible and what would qualify as good practice.

The other point is that the few certifications I have run across serve only to benefit the certifying authority. These companies sometimes appear to have no practical knowledge of the field they are certifying. This makes the certifications relatively useless.

If someone could come up with a certification that actually showed programming ability and was not just a way for a company to claim due diligence, then I would be interested. A real test of this would be if a company could be held accountable if a program failed after their certified Perl programmer refused to sign off on a design and they decided to do it anyway. If the certification doesn't provide any real teeth, what is the point?

BTW, Perl isn't an acronym.

[MadTom]

? I thought Perl was an acronym ... or at least it once was (Practical Extraction and Report Language).

But to the more important point. It does not matter whether or not certification is:

a. worthless
b. not indicative of useful skills
c. for newbies only
d. bound to be out of date in a fast-moving area
e. benefits (makes money) for the certifying organisation

etc.

The point is that it is a GAME Played by employers and HR departments. Having a certificate from a respected body would make it eaasier for me to gain employment as a Perl programmer within large organizations. It is too much effort to try to change the way they work. Heck these people are so thick that they think I can't work on Oracle 11, despite the fact that I have been using Oracle since it used to come on a set of 5.25 inch floppies, and have used every earlier version.

They even think that I can't use AIX because my last Unix work was on Solaris. You can't reason with people that have no actual knowledge of IT beyond a set of buzz words.

In another area of IT I think you can get CISSP accreditation with minimal knowledge of IT security. It seems to me to have been designed only to make money for the certifying body. But many employers ask for it, and having it earned mne a couple of well paid contracts that I would never have had without this (intrinsically not very useful) accreditation.

So I am all for Perl accreditation, even though we all know that it says NOTHING about whether you can actually do the job or not.

[jdporter]

I thought Perl was an acronym ... or at least it once was (Practical Extraction and Report Language).

I guess you haven't even read the most fundamental perlfaq1:

never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.