Re: Certification - Mailing 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