I have been planning to do Sun certification for a long time now. I even bought the book needed but my work pressures and my need to know JAVA properly always pushed me to wait. A couple of days back, I interviewed a candidate for a post in my team at Adobe. He is a SUN Certified JAVA Professional and had given the exam couple of months back.
I usually am happy to interview candidates who come from the JAVA world as it makes my job easier. I started the interview, questioning him on puzzles and mathematical problems of programing. The candidate was average in the same. But when I started to question him on JAVA, I really got to know how much of JAVA does he really know. I started off on some concepts of inheritance and object initialization. He couldn’t answer them. Then I asked him to write a simple program. I always use short form during interviews and I wrote public static void main as PSVM, I was surprised to see him use the same convention, but then when I asked him about what was the data type of the argument list, the answer that I heard was shocking. INT.
He is a sun certified java professional and I had lot of expectations on him and what does he turn out to be. NOTHING.
Does certifications really mean to people? Do they take them for granted or whether the certification programs so very weak? Every programing language teaches you to write a Hello world program which uses a main and people call themselves certified without knowing a simple main properly. I am not generalizing it but it is a just reflection of what I felt after the interview.
DAMN.. Certifications, a logo in your resume, might fetch us an interview call that’s it. It won’t get us a job. Why do people do certifications? For the need of the team management or for better appraisal or for monetary gains when they switch companies? Why. Are people really interested in a some form of technology to get certified in them. HELL. I don’t think so.
I have seen so many candidates being rejected who are Sun certified or Microsoft Certified who didn’t know the basics and on the other side of it, none of the candidates either my team or I hired were not certified in any technology, but they knew what they worked on and had their basics right or in fact were really good in it.
Does certification really mean anything …..
Doodle 