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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

The certification argument seems to forget whose benefits from certification. It's not the developer - it's the people who are able to ensure that there is a baseline level of competence among software developers entrusted with certain kinds of development work.

You're making one huge assumption here: that the certification actually certifies anything at all. As a matter of fact, it does not. Certifications are useless. Having or not having a certification is no indication of presence or lack of programming skill.

I'll go further, though. The certifications do you, as the public who makes use of developer services, a disservice. They imply that someone has verified and certified "a baseline level of competence" - but that implication is a fabrication, a lie.

All the certifications do, effectively, is give people who shouldn't be in programming jobs working for people who shouldn't be hiring programmers.

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> You're making one huge assumption here: that the certification actually certifies anything at all. As a matter of fact, it does not. Certifications are useless. Having or not having a certification is no indication of presence or lack of programming skill.

Bet you're not a fan of driver licensing either, right? 'cause a driver license is no indication of the presence or absence of driving skill, either.

Oh, wait, yes it is.

Driving is a far simpler skill than programming. The fact is, most people in the world are capable of driving a car, after proper tuition. Most people in the world are incapable of developing quality software, after any amount of tuition.

I think one huge problem with software engineering is that hardly anyone within the industry can even agree about what the "gold standard" should be. In those circumstances, it's extremely hard to figure out what a "proper" certification should entail. Even decent certifications end up being opinionated pieces of paper that don't really mean anything to most of the industry.

Fundamentally, programming is about problem-solving. Beyond an IQ test, I'm not sure how you can certify that effectively.

OK, you've fundamentally mis-represented what I've said.

You're talking about programming - I'm talking about certification of software engineering. They are two separate-but-related concepts.

A certification should not be "Joe knows the syntax of language X according to some test" - it should be "Joe is familiar with this range of techniques that can be applied to produce higher-quality software". These are reasonably easy things to test, and their presence or absence is not related to intelligence or programming skill.

Whether (as employees) these programmers actually are expected to apply these concepts is irrelevant. The fact that everyone knows what everyone else knows leads to a basic assumption that you either are applying some good software engineering techniques, or you have examined the reasons why you are choosing not to apply them.

The problem is that we have developers who are perfectly capable of writing good quality software according to some development practice, and developers who don't even know these things exist. If everyone knows what everyone else knows (and users know what developers are expected to know), then we start getting some pretty good assurances that people have at least considered these issues.

And that's worthwhile.

You do not know how to produce higher-quality software. Me neither. But I just /know/ what MS would donate enough $$$ to certification whores to be sure they teach that "to produce higher quality software one should use a platform from The Trusted Vendor." You know, the one who makes "the other browserTM", as in "can you please try this in The Other Browser"?

Most people in the world are incapable of developing quality software, after any amount of tuition.

That's a very strong claim, unless your bar of quality is set very high.

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