Re: Certification Available +Pronounce

Oh, geez.  Apparently it's my day to be beating people with the
testing-methodology stick.

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 09:00:11AM -0700, David Fetter wrote:

> However, in my experience, there is, if anything, a fairly strong
> *negative* correllation between actual skills and acquiring
> certifications.  It is far from obvious to me that stamping out a

[. . .]

> Those marketing advantages can quite quickly vanish, or even go
> turn into a liability, should a cadre of incompetents brandishing
> certificates appear.

All that tells you is that your certification process needs to be
good; not that certification is somehow guaranteed to be bad.  An
instance of something in a class C that exhibits property P does not
entail that all Cs are Ps.

I'll happy agree that certain companies who sell the
most-common-desktop software and the targets-are-shaped-like-Os
database software created certifications that were mostly sales
programmes _instead of_ tests of competency in the areas purportedly
certified.  That does not entail that industrial certifications are
worthless.  In the network area, for instance, SANS certification is
certainly worth something, and even Cisco's offerings are good enough
that such people are usually worth listening to.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
This work was visionary and imaginative, and goes to show that visionary
and imaginative work need not end up well.
        --Dennis Ritchie