From owner-freebsd-advocacy Tue Jun 15 17:21:19 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from xylan.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 96C6B14E97; Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:21:11 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com by xylan.com (8.8.7/SMI-SVR4 (xylan-mgw 2.2 [OUT])) id RAA15309; Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:19:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from omni.xylan.com by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id RAA26550; Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:19:15 -0700 Received: from softweyr.com (dyn2.utah.xylan.com) by omni.xylan.com (4.1/SMI-4.1 (xylan engr [SPOOL])) id AA05827; Tue, 15 Jun 99 17:18:36 PDT Message-Id: <3766ED56.3DE1B63@softweyr.com> Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 18:18:30 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en Mime-Version: 1.0 To: lnb@cybertouch.org Cc: webmaster@freebsdmall.com, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, core@FreeBSD.ORG, Nik Clayton Subject: Re: Tekmetrics tests and FreeBSD Certification References: <5475.929433334@critter.freebsd.dk> <199906151917.PAA16693@freedom.cybertouch.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Lanny Baron wrote: > > Certification, once standardized, in my humble opinion, in addition > to instilling in the person doing hiring or contracting for services, > confidence in the person he/she may be thinking of using, > certification gives the person holding that certification a better > chance to get that job or contract. > > I constantly look for jobs here and in the news paper, in at least > 8/10 cases, certification of some type is required. Most of the employers who are looking for some sort of certification are doing so because they have no capability of evaluating employees on their own. Offer them practically anything and they'll probably bite, because they don't know better. I was the one who called for advocates to visit the tekmetrics site, because I wanted to get a feeling for how the rest of the group felt about their tests in general. I didn't post my concerns because I did not want to taint the opinions of the rest of the group, but since we've now gone a week or so, I'll state my piece and shut up. 1) The Tekmetrics tests are NOT very comprehensive. They are not really intended to be. They aspire to be the equivalent of a screening test an employer might throw up to sort out 1,000 applicants for a sysadmin job down to 10 or 20 that *might* be qualified. 2) The test methodology is easily broken. It would be simple to record the questions given in a particular test, and I suspect you could record a large subset of the total questions in any test in just a few tries. 3) Yes, a certification program might be a "good" thing to have as an assurance to stuffed suits that FreeBSD is a real operating system, with real people using it. Let's face it, the entire tech school industry (in the USA at least) is a pacifier for suits who don't know any better, and churn out thousands of certified, know-nothing and do-nothing boneheads every year, but corporations and especially the gov't departments of welfare-as-we-will-come-to-know-it have swallowed their bait hook, line, and sinker. The whole business has enough stench attached to it we may not want to associate ourselves with it. Eventually the suits are going to wise up to the quality of people turned out by the CNE/MCSE/etc programs and start blaming everyone remotely associated with them for their own failures. OK, I'm done raining on the FreeBSD-Advocacy parade. Please return to our usual mutterings. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message