Meaningful Certification is Hard

When I read Raganwald's post on certification a while back, I was impressed by what laid underneath the surface. What he's looking to certify out of the gate is a first-pass cut to weed out the scrubs and find people with a shared set of values that is not up for discussion - no matter what you're doing or how you're doing it, if you can't prove that you're doing it correctly and safely, it hasn't been done. I like the idea because it implicitly weeds out the people who can't program all that well in the first place; if getting it to compile is a chore, tacking on unit tests and being able to talk coherently about why injection attacks are rendered irrelevant is certainly going to be beyond your means. If it's a certification done on a small scale, you're going to be finding an exclusive group of developers and you're going to have a high degree of confidence in any of them and as such, you've pretty much rendered the cover letter+resume then let's small talk thing moot - you're hired.Of course, this ignores a harsh reality. If there's an economic incentive to having that certification, there will invariably be ways to game the certification. I've interviewed (and worked with) enough incompetent but acronym-accredited developers (IBAADs, copyright MEEEEEEEE) to pay certifications little mind at all. They're not bad, but all that's being certified is that the person's achieved some encylopediac familiarity with the terms of the field rather than a true understanding of how and when to apply them... more on that later.

More recently, Joel's posted about just how lame undergraduate programming courses are. Did you know that people come out of school patently unprepared to do development work? This is, frankly, SHOCKING. That last sentence was, frankly, sarcastic.But don't despair people - software is hardly the only profession where this sort of thing is endemic.

I'm friends with some lawyers and I generally hear the same thing - going to law school and passing the bar is tough, but all it does is certify that you've achieved a base level of competence; they come out of the process thinking that they're ready to take on the world and are pretty immediately humbled when they realize just how unfit they are to do any lawyering. It takes 18-24 months for a freshly bar'd lawyer to be able to do much of anything beyond researching case law, being mentored by more experienced lawyers most of the time. Doesn't this sound familiar?

I can't help but see the similarity with getting my degree in information systems - I graduated with good grades (cum laude, what!) and was sure that there wasn't anything I couldn't do. I look back on my first few jobs/years of professional work and shudder at how awful of a developer I was. I look back on code I wrote a year ago and shudder at that too. At this point I don't think that any amount of education could fulfill all values of "rigorous and practical", let alone most of them. This isn't to give JavaSchools a free pass or whatever, because I've interviewed people from them and their abject lack of passion for the craft is a ferocious turn-off for me.

In that regard, I'm with Joel. I don't expect that people are going to step out of school ready to do it all (not gonna happen) but I do hope that they'll have been exposed to more than one way of doing things. In my time, I brushed up (and a few hours a week for a couple of months is about all that I got in most cases) against x86 assembly, C, C++, COBOL and, yes, Java in my four years of college. I'd like to think that I took a little something away from each of these languages about how you can make software work and the lack of LISP or some other functional language is the reason I'm learning Haskell and going through The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs these days.

Lawyers go through as much college as I did and then 3 more years on top of that and then a certification on top of THAT and at that point, they're still so green that they require a year or two of more or less intensive mentoring to become productive. Word on the street has it that doctors do all that, except that they're putting in hundred hour weeks while they're mentoring to boot.

I understand Joel and Raganwald - I wish that there was some way to certify that the developers have a shared set of values, a shared passion and a capability to rise to the task that's put in front of them, but looking for this to come from schooling or certification is, or so it would seem to me, praying for a magic bullet.

And even those JavaSchools that churn out mediocre developers serve their purpose - we can't all be superstars. A great certification or four years of a great school won't turn mediocrity into a hacker god, and not every piddly project needs a superstar developer. Certifications and education are both fine signifiers, but it'll take something more rigorous than either to signify what we're all after.