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There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value.

There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change. The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism. Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it! This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The things that change aren't the fundamentals. Meanwhile people still read the papers that came out of Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, boolean logic is boolean logic, exponential time algorithms are slower than polynomial time algorithms for large N, the lambda calculus is still taught, etc.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change. The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism. Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.

zarzavat 3y ago
The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it! This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The things that change aren't the fundamentals. Meanwhile people still read the papers that came out of Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, boolean logic is boolean logic, exponential time algorithms are slower than polynomial time algorithms for large N, the lambda calculus is still taught, etc.