Lack of Certification with Modern Languages

Question

Heys Guys,

The only solid exams that are available today for aspiring developers are the Sun/Oracle exams and the Microsoft exams, however J2EE is ancient and Microsoft is well... Microsoft. I think many modern dynamic languages today are more relevant and powerful than their predecessors and yet their is no way to prove your capabilites with them to employers.

Does anyone have any tips/thoughts on whether or not exams/certification will be available to programmers studying Ruby/Python/PHP in the near future?

Answer 1

Ruby Python and PHP are not owned by any specific company, as well as C++ and many other languages. This makes it harder to establish a certification exam. Its like a certification exam for playing hide and seek, there has to be somebody to do it, but nobody individually owns it. :D

Answer 2

For php there is http://www.zend.com/services/certification/ I haven't taken this test, but I did get a study book on it, and the book was fine. I don't know about the other two.

Answer 3

Actually PHP has a certificate from Zend.

Although from my small experience a certificate in PHP is not required to work even in big PHP companies.

Answer 4

In my experience having a certification in a certain language only proves that you are good at obtaining certifications. Sadly, the same can be said for many CS degree holders I've met.

If you want to prove your skills in a language to an employer, show them a project you wrote in said language. That's far more impressive to most people than any slip of paper, and if it's not you may want to question if you really want to be working for an individual who values title more than demonstrated skill.

Answer 5

Speaking as an employer, I think that certifications aren't really that valuable. What you've actually done for other employers is more important. You should be able to demonstrate expertise in the interview by

(a) giving concise, correct answers to the interviewers technical questions

(b) clarifying answers with relevant examples from your previous work

(c) being comfortable with disagreeing with the interviewer (politely) and pointing out how your experience as suggested otherwise.

(d) discussing technical issues which are related to the question but are perhaps drawn from your wider experience e.g. "Yes it's great that Ruby lends itself to being concise but sometimes that can be at the expense of clarity, for example ...."

Chris

Answer 6

Its funny to hear j2ee described as ancient! Heres some dates:

Ruby reached version 1.0 on December 25, 1996
J2EE beta software is released:1999
Scala and was first released in 2003
Python reached version 1.0 in January 1994
Lerdorf released PHP publicly on June 8, 1995

So it seems that only scala is clearly younger than j2ee!

Answer 7

I understand your question, but I would contend that certification in any language provides little proof of capability to do anything but pass a test. I am not suggesting that the tests are worthless or not hard, they should be considered just a small piece of a dev's portfoliio.

Answer 8

oh, in terms of certification:

I once won a bet with an "MSCE" that I could be certified without even touching a windows server! It took me 6 weeks of reading some material on the internet! Needless to say if someone had hired me based on my certification of MSCE she would have been very surprised that I never actually administered a windows network!!

Its kind of like claiming your a mathematician when you have an bs in math.

Answer 9

As said by CrazyJugglerDrummer, these languages have no company behind them. A company called ZEND does provide PHP certification but no such certifications exist for Python and Ruby. There are many sites that provide online certifications, but many recruiters find them of less values as one can easily resort to help during the test. Brainbench has a test for Python but not for ruby. Even w3schools has an online test for PHP. With the popularity of both Python and Ruby growing, you can expect these sites to provide online certifications.

Answer 10

It's very difficult to make a standardized test where results correlate well with exam performance... I don't think there'll be more exams, and I doubt employers in the field of computer science will increase emphasis on certification, or testing... they'll keep their eye on interview performance and code samples.

For example, take the SAT's predictive power regarding freshman year college grades (arguably relevant, if only because it's a prevalent standardized test). In this paper, they relate SAT predictive performance on one given scoring gap with what should be more or less an arbitrary metric.

[A 100-point increase in SAT combined scores] led to a one-tenth of a grade point gain for college GPA ... about the same predictive value as looking at whether an applicant's father had a graduate degree or her mother had completed college.

EDIT: does anyone have data regarding the Microsoft/Sun testing that doesn't come from Microsoft or Sun?

http://www.fairtest.org/sat-i-faulty-instrument-predicting-college-success

Answer 11

It's kind of putting the carriage in front of the horse to expect there to be a certification process for a newer language. When a language is new it has not yet matured enough for there to be standards to test on.

The reason older languages have certifications is precisely because they are older (and therefore are stable enough to build a test around).

Answer 12

Actually, most employer are not looking for programmer with a specific skill. And there are numerous reasons for that :

1. Languages evolve through time, and so your skill must evolve too ; having a knowledge doesn't mean you're capable of evolving.
2. The tricky part in development is not the language, it's the ability of the developer to understand the system as a whole and to master a/some specific part(s) in order to implement a functionality.
3. Another important point is the ability of the developer to communicate with its peers and his client, so would be able to understand the requirements and integrate them in a global project (or software).

So, there is no need to have a certification, because languages are just tools. If you're smart enough, you can always learn a new language.

BTW, Joel Spolsky wrote a wonderful article about recruiting developers.

To conclude, here's my interview tips :

1. Be smart
2. Be open-minded (although it can be considered as being smart)
3. Be rigorous
4. Be passionate
5. Be curious (it includes being up-to-date on the subjects your employer wants you for)