NYCPHP Meetup

[David Mintz]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Mark Armendariz wrote:

> > How do people feel about "official" certification as a
> > qualified PHP programmer?
>
> I generally avoid certs and people who chase them, but that's based on a
> bias from a few  years ago as a manager for a software company hiring to
> fill technical positions.
> <snip />
> Nonetheless, I'd sooner hire someone I would be happy to have a few drinks
> with while chatting about coding methodologies and music than someone waving
> a signed and stamped cert in my face as proof of experience.

I come to this as the eternal wannabe -- the guy with a nominally
non-technical day job who loves coding -- but I have considered this
question in another domain, namely court interpreting. We Spanish
interpreters in the U.S. federal courts take an appropriately challenging
exam to see if our skills and knowledge meet the level required to do the
job responsibly and competently. No exam is perfect, false positives and
false negatives happen. But certification by a reasonably valid and
reliable process makes a nice complement to whatever else the
certification-holder brings to the table. There are tasks you wouldn't
want performed by anyone who didn't have some official credential
attesting to a miminum level of competence -- airline pilot, etc. I think
the net value of certification processes is positive.

I would go for the PHP certification exam in a heartbeat but first I would
want to have a chance to learn as much as possible about it and
"self-study" for it the way I did with Sun's Java programmer certification
(go ahead and jeer). I'd like to know: how many questions there are; the
format of the questions; the time limit; the minimum passing score. And
I'd like to put myself through some practice self-tests. Yes I recognize
that the exam is still being developed. But I'm not eager to pay $80 to
sit for the beta on such short notice.

The announcement speaks of "chapters" where one normally calls them exam
"objectives" or some such.  Are they planning to publish an exam prep
book?

--
David Mintz
http://davidmintz.org/
http://sdnyinterpreters.org/

        "Anybody else got a problem with Webistics?" -- Sopranos 24:17