OT: Degrees and Certifications

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2005, Henry Melancon wrote:

>Unfortunately, I have to deal with the young under-educated coworkers who
>think they know it all........

Hire a teenager while they still know all the answers.

On the other hand, the best definition of an intellectual I've seen
is a person educated beyond their intelligence.

     The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that
     science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely
     require scholarship.  -- Robert Heinlein

A four year college degree, at best, may give one a background in
problem solving, helpful in learning to do something in the real
world.  At worst, the colleges are the last bastion of Marxism,
and serve more to hinder real education than to promote it (think
of the puppies in George Orwell's ``Animal Farm'').

I have a B.A. in Physics and Math from the Johns Hopkins
University, but that certainly didn't qualify me to be either a
physicist or a mathematicion.  I did learn to analyse problems,
and enough basic knowledge of logic, science, and math which has
been very useful over the years.

If somebody has no experience, a certification program may help
them to learn the basics of programming or system administration,
but it may also be a marketing course in disguise (can you spell
MCSE where one learns the Microsoft product to sell to solve any
problem).

I learned FORTRAN when I was hired as a Jr. Electrical Engineer
by Bendix Radio.  My training consisted of being handed a deck of
cards that would compile and produce printed out, a copy of
McGracken's FORTRAN manual, and some more-or-less working code
that I needed to debug and use.  FWIW, I cut the run time of one
program from 20 minutes to two minutes.  The ``certified'' person
who wrote that code computed the square root of PI/2 every time a
subroutine was entered, and all I did was move it into COMMON,
computing it once when the program started.

The only certifications I've earned that were probably worthwhile
were my SCCA National, FIA, and IMSA competition licenses.  I did
take a test to be ``qualified'' to sell SCO OpenDesktop 2.0
(failing the part of the test on backups since I said anybody who
used their recommended backup procedures should be shot).  This,
like many professional certifications was more designed to limit
competition than it was to prove anything significant.  I've seen
far too many SCO Certified folks who didn't have a clue to have
much faith in the certs.

When it comes to developing systems for business applications, I
think it's far more important to understand the business,
accounting, and similar topics, than to be the best coder.  Most
of the commercial accounting software I've seen has major short
comings when it comes to usability.

...
Bill
--
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When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity
for him.  All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
		-- H.L. Mencken, ``Minority Report''