Re: Certification - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy
From | Robert Haas |
---|---|
Subject | Re: Certification |
Date | |
Msg-id | CA+TgmoZ+eaS30_T87ju2S7BV5dQEcprEce7axtDKBduZLgQnpg@mail.gmail.com Whole thread Raw |
In response to | Re: Certification (Michael Meskes <meskes@postgresql.org>) |
Responses |
Certification In Cuba
Re: Certification Re: Certification Re: Certification |
List | pgsql-advocacy |
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 5:06 AM, Michael Meskes <meskes@postgresql.org> wrote: >> I think the difficult that we're likely to run into doing this as a >> community project is that coming up with a certification program >> involves somebody making decisions as to what material will be >> included in the certification and what material will not. Generally, >> if you have 5 community members, they will have 6 opinions on any >> given topic, so getting cross-company agreement on exactly what should >> be part of a certification exam sounds hard. If the content of that > > Why so we need cross-company agreement? Are those of us that work for one of > the PostgreSQL-related companies no longer community members and only allowed > to speak on behalf of their employer? Actually I'm pretty sure this is not > what you want to say Robert. I think you're reading something into what I wrote that wasn't really there. >> exam is known in detail to some companies and not others, those >> companies have a major advantage in preparing a training curriculum >> that will let people pass the exam. If the content of the exam is >> ... > > They way the Linux Foundation handled the Linux certs, they also developed an > online training course. If they did the same for PostgreSQL the curriculum > would be public anyway. How would they develop such a course, except with the help of PostgreSQL community members? > However, this does not take away the need for in-class > trainings run by companies, nor does it remove the need for special > certifications against some companies' products. But again, I wonder why we as > community discuss commercial details of some companies' business models. I am not sure that certification has much use apart from such commercial details. I would not personally be willing to spend time developing curriculum for a certification unless somebody paid me to do it. And the only reason that I can imagine somebody paying me to do it is if it increased the value of a training class which the person or organization paying that money was also providing. Now, it could be that I just need a better imagination. However, in my experience, curriculum development is a lot of work. If it's done for free, I think it's not likely to be high quality. And if it's high quality, I think it will be because people with experience in both PostgreSQL and curriculum development got paid to spend a lot of time creating it, and then more time updating it each time a new release comes out. I would be very happy if someone volunteered to do all of that work on an ongoing basis for no money and then did a great job. I would be even happier if some company volunteered to fund that work on an ongoing basis in a way that benefited not only that company but the whole community. Although I would be happy about those outcomes, I do not think that they are likely. We can seek volunteers for small tasks, but for things that take really large chunks of time people usually need to be paid. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
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