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Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school. These certifications

Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school. These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (the area of the certs) and even more in software (where I work now) memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless in the era of StackOverflow and Google. Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. A test that can be gamed isn't useful for hiring - once again, you're not proving they're a competent programmer, just that they're good at taking tests. No company you want to get hired at will use such a metric. If it was possible to prove the quality of a coder via a certification test, we'd be out of a job. One of the key signs of a good programmer is their ability to expertly handle problems & situations they've never encountered before, which is (by definition) impossible via some sort of standardized test. A certification might prove that I've memorized the parameters that get passed into the function in Array.prototype.map but it'll never tell me if someone can build software solutions to real-life problems.

Spooky23 10y ago
No offense, but those certifications are pretty low value. The A+, etc solely exist because the federal government requires them for contractors. Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach to people with aptitude but without credentials. It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other areas to give disadvantaged folks a way to get into the industry without a four year degree in CS. It's bizarre though. Companies won't even look at CS graduates from state schools, but will hire someone who went through a glorified training class.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Which companies are disregarding state school graduates? Don't Amazon, Facebook, et. al. send recruiting teams to most state schools?
  - John23832 10y ago
    I got an offer from Facebook and I went to Virginia Tech, a state school. I think it depends on the quality/prestige of the CS program.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech are probably the highest-regarded state schools for Computer Science. (I am excluding the University of California system because its high cost and stringent admissions make it more similar to private institutions)
- RKoutnik 10y ago
  None taken, the IC3 in particular exists so that people can say they're "certified". The qualifications are things like "Make some text bold in MS Word". Ridiculous.
ben_jones 10y ago
What about a project based approach with testing similar to the AP exams (multiple graders, on a curve, with deviance from the mean singled out and examined)? I.E. implement a 12 factor web application using the python standard library that can handle x volume of traffic on n cores with y gb of ram where n and y are somewhat excessive? Could be interesting IMO.
- RKoutnik 10y ago
  That's literally a bootcamp (at least, the good ones). I taught at a bootcamp myself a while back and the entire curriculum was project-based. We wanted the students to imagine something and build it. Most of the bootcamp was about teaching new tools/techniques and providing support to our students as they built things.
falcolas 10y ago
How would you feel if one of the certification point consisted of: Able to read, manipulate, and emit the contents of a file. And the test point given by one proctor consisted of: Write a program which accepts this file and translates all 'c' characters to 'C' characters, and puts the modified contents of the file to stdout. Nothing too fancy, but a useful starting point (feel free to come up with a better test question than the one I devised in under 15 seconds). Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school. > memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless I used to think this, but accessing data in your brain is faster than accessing it on Stack Overflow. And sometimes it's impossible to find the right answer without at least having the right terminology. "remove an item from a list where each item in the list has a reference to the next item in that list" doesn't return a meaningful Stack Overflow result, and the notes from a CS course show up below the fold in a google search; yet the use of the rote-learned phrase "linked list" yields not only a page full of meaningful google results, but the suggestions include every language which uses linked lists.
- RKoutnik 10y ago
  That certification sounds a lot like the job interviews HN constantly complains about - lots of minor Googleable trivia, no hard problem solving. I don't see how it'd be useful beyond possibly skipping the phone screen. > Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school. It's a lot harder to game those things than it is a certification test.
clifanatic 10y ago
> Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. Seems to be working for the American Bar Association.
- flukus 10y ago
  I could be wrong, IANAL, but isn't the bar association test based on memorizing a tonne of stuff? A certification based on how much of on API someone can remember would be worth nothing.

Spooky23 10y ago

No offense, but those certifications are pretty low value. The A+, etc solely exist because the federal government requires them for contractors. Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach to people with aptitude but without credentials. It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other areas to give disadvantaged folks a way to get into the industry without a four year degree in CS. It's bizarre though. Companies won't even look at CS graduates from state schools, but will hire someone who went through a glorified training class.

linkregister 10y ago
Which companies are disregarding state school graduates? Don't Amazon, Facebook, et. al. send recruiting teams to most state schools?
- John23832 10y ago
  I got an offer from Facebook and I went to Virginia Tech, a state school. I think it depends on the quality/prestige of the CS program.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech are probably the highest-regarded state schools for Computer Science. (I am excluding the University of California system because its high cost and stringent admissions make it more similar to private institutions)
RKoutnik 10y ago
None taken, the IC3 in particular exists so that people can say they're "certified". The qualifications are things like "Make some text bold in MS Word". Ridiculous.

ben_jones 10y ago

What about a project based approach with testing similar to the AP exams (multiple graders, on a curve, with deviance from the mean singled out and examined)? I.E. implement a 12 factor web application using the python standard library that can handle x volume of traffic on n cores with y gb of ram where n and y are somewhat excessive? Could be interesting IMO.

RKoutnik 10y ago
That's literally a bootcamp (at least, the good ones). I taught at a bootcamp myself a while back and the entire curriculum was project-based. We wanted the students to imagine something and build it. Most of the bootcamp was about teaching new tools/techniques and providing support to our students as they built things.

falcolas 10y ago

How would you feel if one of the certification point consisted of: Able to read, manipulate, and emit the contents of a file. And the test point given by one proctor consisted of: Write a program which accepts this file and translates all 'c' characters to 'C' characters, and puts the modified contents of the file to stdout. Nothing too fancy, but a useful starting point (feel free to come up with a better test question than the one I devised in under 15 seconds). Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school. > memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless I used to think this, but accessing data in your brain is faster than accessing it on Stack Overflow. And sometimes it's impossible to find the right answer without at least having the right terminology. "remove an item from a list where each item in the list has a reference to the next item in that list" doesn't return a meaningful Stack Overflow result, and the notes from a CS course show up below the fold in a google search; yet the use of the rote-learned phrase "linked list" yields not only a page full of meaningful google results, but the suggestions include every language which uses linked lists.

RKoutnik 10y ago
That certification sounds a lot like the job interviews HN constantly complains about - lots of minor Googleable trivia, no hard problem solving. I don't see how it'd be useful beyond possibly skipping the phone screen. > Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school. It's a lot harder to game those things than it is a certification test.

clifanatic 10y ago

> Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. Seems to be working for the American Bar Association.

flukus 10y ago
I could be wrong, IANAL, but isn't the bar association test based on memorizing a tonne of stuff? A certification based on how much of on API someone can remember would be worth nothing.