SCJP Advantages

Question

Is there any advantage in having certifications like SCJP,SCWCD etc..

Answer 1

In my experience, my Java certification gave me three advantages:

1. In interviews, I no longer get asked low-level language-based questions any more. My knowledge of how Java works is a given.
2. In a tight market, given two candidates of equal work experience, the one with the cert has a slight edge.
3. I learned a lot of low-level stuff -- like how and when the JVM promotes a byte to an int -- that I know I never would have bothered to learn on my own. So from an educational standpoint, I gained some chops.

Here are the problem with these certs:

1. They measure how well you know the ins and outs of Java, not how well you program. It is entirely possible for a hopelessly-bad programmer to pass this test and still be hopelessly bad at programming. (Much the same way that, in the US, our universities have to deal regularly with students who, having aced the Test of English as a Foreign Language, still arrive on campus without the ability to communicate effectively in English. I mean no disrespect to these students, but it's one thing to memorize your way through a test, quite another to be able to put newly acquired skills into practice.)
2. A lot of the questions are on picky, tricky behaviors of the language of the sort that you will never use in your day-to-day programming. The SCJP 1.4 exam spent an inordinate amount of time on bit-twiddling -- ANDs and ORs and XORs. Useful knowledge if you're a C programmer, but not so much in Java.
3. A lot of knowledge you do need won't be on the test. Personally, I would have liked to have seen more comprehensive coverage of multi-threading issues in my own test.

On the whole I think certifications are worthwhile, even with their limitations.