On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 10:37:43 -0500, James Linden Rose, III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 10:54 PM, Ben Tilly wrote: [...] > Interesting that you've imagined yourself in a position to be > interviewing me. Not a very likely scenario though.
I have no idea how likely it is. However where I've worked, I've usually been asked to vet any programmers that they are considering hiring. So I'm familiar with interviewing people and trying to judge their competence as Perl programmers. [...] > > His name is Schwartz. With a silent c in it. Agree or disagree > > with him, it is polite to get his name correct. > > It must really suck not to have anything relevant to certification to > say, and yet wanting to say so much so badly. Back handed personal > attacks seldom further your point of view. That was not intended as a personal attack. It was intended to help you avoid continuing to make a mistake. Feel free to disregard. > > Future advice, people who start and run their own businesses are > > seldom anti-capitalistic. If you think that they are being so, then > > you're probably missing something important about how they > > perceive their own economic interests. > > A lecture about what people who start and run their own business are > like? PLEASE TELL ME MORE! Randal speaks a little on his interest in > money on the page you suggested, and I don't think this would be > characterized as naked capitalist greed: "I've worked too hard over > the past decade to help this community in as many free ways as I can, > and get paid for the things that I have to get paid for so that I can > put food on the table and pay for my net access." I've also talked with Randal, and my impression is that he believes that there is a lot of free stuff that he needs to do in order to get the paying work that he wants. There is more that he needs to do in order to attract the employees that he wants. There is, of course, a virtuous feedback cycle between having the employees that he wants and getting the results that he wants which helps him get repeat business at the fees that he wants. He is generous, but he does have economic rationalizations for his actions. (I'm not saying that he's right or wrong about them, merely that he's a capitalist.) > > In a straw poll of the 3 programmers sitting closest to me, > > one was slightly against, one slightly for, and one didn't > > care. I think that that's probably representative. > > Well, gee, I had no idea that the guy next to you agrees... Read more closely, please. _None_ of them agree with my position on certification. (Possibly because none of them have really thought about it, because none of them really care.) The only confirmation there is that that matches my impression of the broader community. However said impression is partly based on the people that I interact with, so there is some circularity there. And the point? The point is that saying that people who actively oppose certifications are a MINORITY (your emphasis) doesn't make people who actively support them into a majority. > > MIT is also the school which introduced Scheme as a way > > of introducing programming. > > Point being? Your original claim was that schools were picking Java because that's what their teachers are certified in. That MIT would pick Scheme suggests that this claim is questionable. > > I doubt that Carnegie-Mellon > > teaches a course whose purpose is to specifically help you > > pass the MCSE. > > Point being? Again I'm addressing the question of whether academia pays undue amounts of attention to industry certifications in making their choices. > > (If it does, I guarantee that I can find people > > in the department who're not very happy about it.) > > I think you misunderstand why the great technical schools are so great. > Rule 1: They seldom get caught up in the mental masturbation of the > impractical. Having sold MIT to industry for 7 years in a past life I > can safely say that its close ties to the practical concerns of > industry are its greatest strength, and why an MIT education prepares > students to be relevant to the real world. Hire somebody from a school > more caught up in ivory tower snobbery, and you have to wait at least a > year before they come up to speed. You think that I misunderstand. That's fair, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. However I don't think that I'm misunderstanding anything here, and I haven't seen you provide any evidence that I do. > > Furthermore even in professional schools (medicine, law, > > etc), while the school may provide practical training, the > > faculty are still expected to participate in (and are likely to be > > primarily judged on) research. That's certainly true of both > > schools that you mention. > > You use every misdirection debating technique in existence. > Engineering research is hardly "academia". At least at MIT and to a > lesser extent CMU, it is almost always looking toward a practical > application. Net result: 4,000 MIT related companies. 12 Nobel prize > winners on staff. The deepest industrial ties of any school in the > world. I'm puzzled about what you think that I'm arguing for so unfairly. Because I feel like I'm saying one thing and you are responding to something very different. I'm trying to respond to the claim that having an industry certification would make Perl more popular in academia. I disagree with that claim. Pointing out that applied research is by its very nature more practical than pure research does not relate to the original claim or my response. Question for you. Do you think that MIT faculty are judged more on which industry certifications they have or on their research? How much do you think that the availability of certifications directs their teaching? > > I stand by my comment that, charter's notwithstanding, > > universities are not supposed to be in the business of > > vocational training. (Although they are often pushed in > > that direction, particularly by students and parents of > > students who go there to help job prospects.) > > Sigh. Yes. They are not votech schools teaching welding and oil > filter replacement. Nor do they usually try to get their students through random industry certifications. The professional schools obviously do attempt to certify their graduates. Those certifications are very different though, for one thing there tend to be legal requirements that people have them if they wish to participate in those professions. For another, aquiring those certifications is far, far harder than the industry certification that we're talking about creating for Perl. > > This might work out, or might not. I'm inclined towards > > pessimism, but have no real evidence supporting that. > > It would make life easier for companies that need to hire Perl > programmers for basic routine programming jobs. Its not a guru netting > tool, but gurus are not what many companies need. I would love to have > somebody to take over many of the mundane Perl tasks I have at my > company one day. I don't need to hire a Randal or a Larry nearly as > much as I need somebody basically trained. Somebody I can trust to do > basic level tasks so I can focus on growth and marketing. How do you think it would make your life easier? Do you think that you could just hire anyone with a certification and trust them to be competent? That's dubious at best. Many of us have painful experiences with people who've been hired on that basis. This breeds legitimate cynicism about the value of certifications. Do you think that aquiring a certification will be applicable to what you want people to know? I see two possibilities here, one is that the certification is shallow so that you could easily teach any competent person what is covered in the certification (and would need to teach a lot more to get anywhere useful), while the other is that the certification attempts to provide depth and therefore makes candidates go through a lot of work to develop skills, most of which do not apply to you. So it is either fairly useless or it limits the applicant pool too much. In neither case does it really do what you want. In short, outsourcing your hiring decision to a third party certification authority may look appealing, but I don't think that it will work very well in practice. Again, the fact that 4 of the 5 most commonly used languages do NOT have certifications strongly suggests that, anecdotal incidents notwithstanding, certifications are not necessary for languages to succeed. Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
