From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 1 11: 2:21 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rdc1.wa.home.com (ha1.rdc1.wa.home.com [24.0.2.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8E89737BBE8 for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 11:02:15 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from john@home.com) Received: from C702312-A.sttln1.wa.home.com ([24.14.237.48]) by mail.rdc1.wa.home.com (InterMail v4.01.01.00 201-229-111) with ESMTP id <20000301190213.QHVM9076.mail.rdc1.wa.home.com@C702312-A.sttln1.wa.home.com> for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 11:02:13 -0800 Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 11:06:54 -0800 (PST) From: goodleaf X-Sender: john@C702312-A.sttln1.wa.home.com To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: In re: Certifications (long and rambling) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I realize I risk extreme sanction here, but: I have known several certified idiots, but on the other hand I've actually taken a short cert course in programming basics, and I have to say I learned quite a bit. (A vast improvement over the absolutely nothing I knew prior.) Of course this doesn't qualify me as a software engineer, but I can do a bit in C and Perl. This was at the University of Washington, which AFAIK, does a lot of work to ensure their cert courses are somewhat rigorous. I think that cert courses in principle are a tremendously good idea, particularly where the course teaches basic skills to people who don't know much about the subject at hand, but who have some education in other things. Clearly, it's not as good as a full computer science degree, but for people like me, reasonably intelligent people who already have an education (I have two degrees already.) a certification course is a Good Thing. The problem with cert courses as they exist in most places is that they're extremely poorly implemented and not held to any particular academic standard. But this is not an absolute; there are good cert courses, so I think the knee-jerk prejudice against certification that I see among UNIX folk is misplaced and unproductive. What would be nice is a pooling of what we know. Which specific courses are bad? Which schools are turning out too many idiots? I'd very much like to see a good FreeBSD cert course out there. If it's well done, it would teach me a lot and pad my resume. Both things are good. I may take the UW's Unix Administration cert course. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks, John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message