NYCPHP Meetup

[Tim Lieberman]

Following up on my own post, just to be clear -- I think a certification 
exam for web developers is impossible. And/or the fact that you know PHP 
inside and out doesn't make you worth anything on a real project. You 
can't reduce the breadth and complexity to a multiple-choice test.  Such 
a setup is too easily gamed.

What might be interesting would be some kind of jury system.  If there 
were a 4-ish person jury consisting of, I dunno, Steve Manes, Tom 
Riemer, Jack Slocum, and Chris Corbyn , who would review a bunch of 
"thesis-like" stuff you put together, and then hop on a chat and 
interrogate you for an hour before saying "yeah, this guy/gal is pro or 
slow" -- then I might pay attention to that, when hiring you.

So who wants to help recruit some recognizable names, and start selling 
"shots" at such a cert.  Maybe 3 or 5 $k to sit in front of the jury ... 
I mean, you've got to pay these juries well.  These are busy people.

-Tim



Tim Lieberman wrote:
> Certifications about particular technologies are dumb, unless there's 
> a certain amount of built-in complexity that justifies them (or not, 
> but I don't know what Cisco certifications are like, etc).  PHP is a 
> small enough system that it doesn't warrant it.
>
> Any competent programmer can become satisfactorily proficient in a 
> language in less than two weeks (assuming the language is of a common 
> langauge class -- C to lisp is hard.  Perl or C to php is simple.  
> Also see C++ to Java, PHP to ColdFusion, Java to C#, etc).  Given two 
> or three months, that programmer who gained some proficiency can 
> become fairly expert.
>
> If you want a certification, it should be wider.
>
> As someone who's in a position to hire, I'd love to see a really 
> strong certification that I could count on.  This would require 
> conceptual knowledge, not particulars about a language.
>
> I want someone who can (among other things):
>
>    - Administer UNIX-like servers.  Including some basic understaning 
> of package management, and also (especially?) compiling from source.
>    - Can at least make their way around a windows/IIS type system.
>    - Understands version control systems (for me, CVS + SVN, but you'd 
> probably need to understand VSS in the cert exam).
>    - Knows how to program.  Understands how to optimize (and when).  
> Understands recursion.
>    - Has a good knowledge of object-oriented things.    - Knows their 
> way around major design patterns (MVC, Singletons, Factories, and so on)
>    - Understands SQL -- you might be a PHP-expert, but if you're 
> writing bad SQL your app will suck (unless it eschews SQL entirely -- 
> how often does that happen).
>    - Understands XML parsers.
>    - Understands some common XML-based standards (SOAP, RSS)
>    - Knows how to write a cron job that will actually work.
>    - Can manually interact with an SMTP server (via telnet)
>
> Knowledge of PHP's syntax just simply pales in comparison to the 
> importance of this stuff.  PHP is *easy* to learn if ... wait for it 
> ... you know how to program your way out of a paper bag.  
> ($bag.exit();?  exit($me,$bag);? $this.parent = null;? ... maybe it's 
> harder than I thought ... getting claustrophobic!)
>
> All this stuff (together) is hard to test for, and it's hardly an 
> exhaustive list.  It's also just the start of the list that *I* want 
> -- some people might not care about version control, for instance.
>
> But a much better place to start, IMO, is not a PHP certification, but 
> some kind of overall web-development certification.
> I care a LOT more about a candidate having a good understanding of 
> relational databases than I do about them understanding PHP.  I also 
> want my subordinates to be clear on good semantic markup, and have a 
> good, solid understanding of Javascript (these days).
>
>
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