Certification — No, thanks

Let me say it up front. I’m no fan of certifications, and I’ll try to share my reasons. Three things prompted this article.

• I recently struck up a conversation on the bus with Tomáš Záluský about the Java certification he was hard at work preparing for.
• Vlasta Vávrů, the well-known Java blogger, also got certified.
• And I came across the discussion Open Source Contribution — Alternative to Certification?.

To be specific, Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0 doesn’t appeal to me. I carry neither a compiler nor an interpreter in my head. I can’t picture myself doing what the runtime does, compiling and interpreting source code on a piece of paper and writing out the result. I’d rather spend the processor time I save on learning something else.

I do grant the certificate tells you something. Whether it says the holder can compile and execute Java code in their head or that they know Java well depends entirely on the person reading it. I’d be even more cautious about Sun’s more advanced certifications.

What bothers me most is that they fill your head with Sun’s version of the truth, and only that. Sometimes you end up stuffed with theory you can’t use in practice. It can give you a distorted view of other technologies.

That’s why I liked the idea in Open Source Contribution — Alternative to Certification? It’s simple. Spend the time you would have put into studying for a certification contributing to an open-source project. Unfortunately, that’s no cure-all either.

Problem one is that a contribution, its scope and its value are hard to verify unless your name happens to be Gavin King. Developers usually help with projects they use. If those projects are large, contributing can be almost impossible, which is problem two. Take my own example. I recently found a silly bug in Hibernate. It had gone unreported for a while and the fix was embarrassingly simple. I confirmed the bug, wrote the fix and attached the diff and a unit test. Even a follow-up email didn’t move things along.

That example shows you can make a genuine effort to contribute and still get nowhere. Both certification and contribution tell you something, but what they tell you depends heavily on who’s looking. A contribution does have one significant advantage. It’s something tangible, which is hard to say about a certification.