What's your take on certifications?
It took me over 10 years before I took my first certifications (last year at Lotusphere, crammed in 3 tests between the sessions). I never believed in certifications, I can tell some horror stories about "certified" developers that could not code very good at all. All I say is "GetNthDocument"...
At this years Lotusphere, I wanted to upgrade my Certified Application Developer to the Advanced level for 6.0/6.5, and also try to upgrade to Notes/Domino 7.0. The advanced upgrade (exam 273) was no problem, but I failed the 7 upgrade. Since I am still on R5 at work (some clients are on 7.0.2, but development has to be done for 5.0.12), I did not have that much experience of creating web services or using DB2 in Notes, which were what most of the test was about.
But what really made me wonder were all the questions about the new user interface. Is the biggest and most important thing for a developer to know that if you click "do not show this dialog again" when you get the prompt to close Designer, the prompt will also go away in the Notes client?
What about having a couple of questions about something that is really useful for a developer to know? Like how to work with lists, for example.
On the bus to the Lotusphere Wednesday party at Islands of Adventure, I was sitting next to André Guirard, and we talked about the tests. He said he did review the tests a while back, and they were thinking about revising them. But I did not get any word on what the current plan is.
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1 Debbie Farley Permalink My previous employer didn't care about certifications at all. My current employer views them as positive and shows I am staying up to date in my area of expertise. But you are right, having a certification doesn't a great programer or admin make.
2 Karl-Henry Martinsson Permalink My current boss does encourage us to get certifications. Not because he think that makes us better developers/admins/etc, but
because it looks good when auditors look at our company, and when
we market our services. I work for an insurance company, and they
want to be able to show that the IT staff is competent. To most
people, certifications are the way to show competence, even if we
know it is not the case all the time.
At my current workplace, "staying up to date" is almost a bad word.
We are on Notes 5 (slowly moving to 7 due to Citrix
implementation). No thoughts about adding SameTime, Quickr,
etc...
3 Kim Greene Permalink Thats one of the perennial problems with certfication tests. They often don't represent the "real-world." It disturbs me that this certification test focuses on the NSFDB2, when only 3 platform currently have (and ever will have) this support.