Maybe it’s because I think I should be willing to hire me.
Every so often, someone offers a syllogism along these lines:
Major premise: In trades like the law and medicine, you can’t practice without a formal certification. That’s important because lives are at stake, or if not lives, then important stuff of some kind. So you don’t want just anyone hanging out their shingle to cut open the unwary or defend them in court.
Minor premise: Programmers produce software that, depending on who they work for and what it’s supposed to do, also puts lives or other important stuff on the line.
Conclusion: Programmers should be required to earn a professional certification before they can write software for a living.
If we’d had to in 1980, I couldn’t have hired me. See, back in the day I taught myself to program in order to analyze a stack of data I’d collected from my electric fish research (no other management consultants have that on their resumes!). It wasn’t big data … there wasn’t such a thing back then … but it was big-enough data that I didn’t want to tally it by hand.
Then I discovered the painful truth: I’d never be more than a third-stringer in my chosen field (sociobiology) – a conclusion I reached after realizing how much smarter several second-stringers were than I was. With exactly one marketable skill, I became a professional programmer.
A few years later I was assigned the job of designing a system of some size and significance. (Warning: This retelling makes me look very, very insightful, and downright visionary. It is, I suppose, just barely possible the passing years have added a rosy glow to my memory. Anyway …)
Not knowing how to go about designing a big system, I did what any sociobiologist would have done in similar circumstances: I faked it. I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about how they went about the work they did, and how the computer might help them do it better.
I mocked up what the screens might look like and fiddled with the designs until everyone agreed they could do their work a lot better with screens like these to support them.
That’s when my ignorance became public knowledge, the result of the head of App Dev asking me two questions I couldn’t answer: (1) What reports was the system supposed to generate? and (2) was the design I’d just published before or after I’d negotiated the feature set down from the users’ wish list?
I didn’t know how to answer the first question because while the head of App Dev figured the point of every information system was to print reports that provide useful information, I’d been designing a system to make work happen more effectively.
I couldn’t answer question #2 for the same reason. The various users and I had designed a system to manage and support workflows. Taking out features would have broken work streams. Negotiate features? I couldn’t even figure out what that conversation might be like.
The system ended up being the biggest successful development effort the IT department in question deployed in more than a decade, and not because it was the only attempt.
The point of this little tale isn’t to show you of how smart I am, although if you draw that conclusion I certainly won’t object.
The point is that back when I started programming professionally, certification would have meant learning the accepted wisdom regarding how to design information systems … accepted wisdom back then that we’ve since learned just doesn’t work.
Certifications in the 1980s would have prevented anyone from co-designing software and business processes. Certifications in the 1990s would have prevented the entire world wide web, and around 2000 they’d have prevented Agile.
Mandatory certifications are supposed to prevent bad things from happening. In IT, I’m pretty sure that while they probably would prevent some bad things from happening, they’d prevent a lot of positive developments at the same time.
See, while the law and medicine certainly have new developments all the time that require, not just a static certification but lifetime learning as well, both fields operate from a stable core set of practices that really do represent the minimum standard of basic professionalism.
We don’t have that in IT, at least not yet, at least not in a way that’s more than just a matter of personal preference. Even something as seemingly stable as normalized data design is proving, with the advent of NoSQL technologies, to be less broadly applicable than we thought even five short years ago.
So required certifications? In IT, at least, they’d be more likely to prevent progress than anything else.
I think certifications have their uses in IT.
One of the problems when trying to hire someone is trying to determine whether they are technically qualified; certifications help to establish a reference point.
For vendors, certifications are a great way to lock customers into using their products.
They also bring in a lot of revenue.
And who said that IT is interested in progress?
Progress in not linear. Certifications assume that you can an IT department without, innovation. “You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it” – Albert Einstein
The discussion about certification is a whole 55-gallon drum of worms! I’ll try to stay as brief as I can.
There are two aspects that need to be considered: the professions involved, and the certifications themselves. I think I can say something intelligent (not necessarily correct) from each side. I was in IT for over 30 years before being laid off (leaving that company with no QA staff, a mistake they’ve regretted ever since). Now I am both a tax professional and a professional genealogist, two fields with ongoing heated debates about certification.
As a side comment, there is a difference between certification and licensing; this difference must also enter the discussion.
In medicine, as I understand it, one needs a license to practice at all. This supposedly demonstrates a certain minimum level of competency, gained after years of study and exams. Certification can then be granted by various specialty boards, hopefully indicating that the individual has demonstrated a level of competency in a specialized field such as internal medicine. I think most people would run as fast as they could from a physician who wasn’t licensed, but very few outside the profession actually look at later certificates, though in some specialties I can see states requiring such certification.
The difference between the medical profession and IT is that in medicine there usually are no second chances. There is no QA process while the patient is on the operating table that allows the surgeon to tweak his procedure and try again. In the software field one certainly hopes that intensive testing is done before the software is unleashed on an unsuspecting world!
This is the crux of the debates in my field. If a genealogist isn’t certified, the chances of anyone being physically harmed are next to zero. Being certified or licensed as a tax professional would definitely be of greater benefit to the public; those of us in favor of such a requirement agree that it won’t weed out the unethical, but the public otherwise has no way to judge the competence of a tax preparer, and the taxpayer is 100% responsible for the return regardless of who prepares it. Save this thought for the next section.
Now we come to the certifications themselves. I was one of the first to earn the CSDP (Certified Software Development Professional) from IEEE. I was interested in that certification, along with some offered by the American Society for Quality, because they weren’t simply offered at the end of a course of study. They required in-depth knowledge *and experience* in a number of areas. I’ve never had much regard for most of the Microsoft certificates because they don’t have an experience requirement.
In the tax field, on the other hand, most of the work is based on knowledge and simple testing is sufficient. What’s important here is continuing education (when I taught a class on tax updates this year, it was 2 hours long just to cover what the Congress did past the 11th hour).
That’s way too much supporting material, but I can sum up my position by giving the standard tax professional response: “it depends.” In some fields licensing and certification are vital, but in most licensing isn’t really necessary and certification is valid as a differentiator, as long as the certification requirements are appropriate for the particular subject.
My own POV is that people who debate the pros and cons of certifications as was summarized in the first half of this article are missing the point. Certifications and “ability to innovate” are orthogonal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonality) concerns.
Can someone with certification be innovative? Yes. Can someone without them be? Bob’s anecdotal evidence says yes.
I guess the question is there a trend that people with certifications, as a large cohort, demonstrate lower ability (and ability, not opportunity) to innovate? Not so sure anyone has a real answer to that one?
Great article !
I also got into IT using a back door without the proper credentials and have had a long and successful career.
I had a job many years ago that expected employees to obtain certification so I got it. The certification did not prove that I knew anything more than the answers to the tests.
Regards,
Dave
You are correct that certifications certify only that you meet the current expectations. imo, you should beware of them the same way you must beware of generals preparing for last century’s warfare.
One of the few times I’d disagree with you, Bob.
I think one of the main uses for college degrees or even IT certifications is. . . say it with me: “ex-ter-nal val-i-da-tion”. External validation– That is to say, someone external to you with no (obvious) bias (hopefully) as validated you have a particular skillset. Not your mom, your local pastor, your favorite high school teacher. . . not someone who can be swayed or bought or simply likes you more than the next guy.
Certifications and degrees have that value– they help prove you possess that skillset or at least some level of valid exposure. Sure, they’re not the end-all and be-all but they help provide a formalized foundation the recipient might not have had otherwise.
Your article illustrates the limitations of certifications. I don’t know if there even could be a certification available for “innovates and improves upon current practices”. But even people who do have certifications are able to improve upon established and innovate new practices.
In my case, I could have done the first part of your project – mock up useful screens demonstrating functionality for the new system based on the users’ needs – but then I would be stuck on the actually programming the system to make it work. Because among all the many certs I lack is anything in programming. (I don’t have any certs in Business Analysis either, but I’ve done it enough.)
Your comparisons to law and medicine are interesting. Both of those fields are ancient ones with long long histories. I doubt there were any certs available for either law or medicine within a century of their initial development. Probably certs of any kind had yet to be invented.
Yet it could be true that certification requirements in medicine may be limiting its best practice. Medical certs are varied and many for different levels and different specializations. Once the level of specialization is achieved through the certification process, the practitioners tend to be locked into that way of thinking. The specializations are usually based upon systems of the body rather than around symptoms or disease (oncology, pediatrics and geriatrics being some exceptions). However, conditions such as obesity, depression, chronic fatigue, and others may have origins in multiple body systems (endocrinological, neurological, psychiatric, immunological) which under current practice would require multiple specialists working together to understand each unique patient. Which is difficult to coordinate, and which may be contributing to the current difficulties sufferers from those disorders encounter in obtaining effective treatment.
Us “old-timers” (read: “deeply experienced”) cannot help but see certifications as little more than additional profit centers to (primarily) now-bloated corporations.
On the other hand, I can only imagine the headaches of HR and IT trying to hire new staff. Assessing experience in products that come and go–or are unrecognizable–in 2-4 years is tough. Particularly when programming seems to be more “art” than “science”–i.e., no two people solve the problems exactly the same.