Re: Is my MySQL Gaining ? - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

>
>
> > Have you undertaken the MySQL certifications? If not, how can you say
> > that they are not worthwhile?
> >
>
> I think what a lot of people forget is that certifications are meant
> to be a baseline. They are meant to allow an employer to say,
> "Hey this person at least has some idea of what they are doing."
>
> Also, specifically pertaining to many people on this list, certification
> is pointless. For them. There is a point in your professional life
> where a certification becomes "So What" and your resume should be
> enough.
>
> Frankly, if someone like Tom Lane came to me and said, "Hey I have 20
> years experience with databases and I am a PostgreSQL core developer."
> My response would not be, "Do you have any certs?" and I would
> question the sanity, validity, and intelligence of any person who did.
> He has the experience and resume to back up his worth.
>
>

I think that we realise that someone like Tom Lane, or Bruce Momjian,
would not need to worry about having to have things like certification,
but, it must be remembered that not everyone is a recognised PostgreSQL
guru, and, people are at different levels, regarding something like
PostgreSQL.

And, certification is subjective. I had not heard of some things, like
Bernoulli's theorem, until I attended university, and my wife's younger
brother has covered that with one of his primary school classes that he
teaches. And, whereas in 1978, to become a laboratory assistant in New
Zealand, required a Bachelor of Science, and, to become a laboratory
assistant in Western Australia, required having passed a universities
entrance exam at secondary school, or a technical college certificate,
which was at about the same level as the universities entrance
examination. That was due to different countries having different levels
of difficulty in obtaining employment, and thus, employers being able to
be selective to different degrees (no pun intended), due to differing
employment market pressures.

But, in both countries, having passed a universities entrance
examination, meant the same, or similar, level of achievement had
been completed, and, having completed a university degree, had the
similar meaning.

And, as you said in your first paragraph above, certifications are meant
to be a baseline, and they give an employer good reason to believe that
a person has some idea of what the person is doing, at the level of the
certification.

I know that people who have been in computing, from before computing
degrees were dreamed of, probably do not need formal qualifications.

However, as with software engineering, and computer science, degree
courses and certifications, apart from completion being able to show
that a person has achieved a particular standard, there is also the
important aspect, that a person has been trained to do something
(relatively) properly, in most cases.

So, whilst people on the list, in discussing prospective content of
trating courses and/or tutorials, have said that issues like
normalisation, are too generic, and have no place in PostgreSQL
training, if the formal, standardised, structured, training and
certification that I have suggested, is implemented, and, it includes
generic database stuff, like normalisation, then a prospective employer
or hirer of a contractor, who may know something about databases, may be
given the knowledge that a prospective employee, is unlikely to use
postgreSQL to generate what is not much more than a flat-file database,
when a database should be normalised.

It goes to the issue of having an idea of the value of formal training
and certification. In that, I mean a prospective employer, having an
idea of the value.

A good example of the need for formalised, standardised, structured,
training and certification, is a man that I met several year sgo, who
was the head of the maths and computing teaching department at one of
the universities, here in Western Australia. He told me that he didn't
believe in documenting programs. His area was computing, and he taught
computer programming. Given the complexity of some computer programming
languages, and the possible obscurity of some code, I hope that I never
encounter the code of such a programmer. My wife has encountered
undocumented databases, that she has had to modify, or, to migrate to
another DBMS. Much time can be wasted through bad practices.

To quote from a book that we have just acquired; "Troubleshooting SQL",
by Forrest Houlette, 2001, (the book, whilst being SQL-Server-oriented,
including material relating to SQL in general), in the chapter "Using
Best Practices";
"Recently I had to perform maintenance on a program that was written by
a guy who believed that you should have to struggle with code to
understand it. He used one-character variable names, and as a
consequence the cost of having a consultant come in to do maintenance on
this program was considerably higher than it should have been. Let's do
the math to illustrate the point. Average billable hours went to this
company at $55 per hour. It took eight hours just to figure out what
this piece of code did. That time cost the company $440. Keep in mind,
all that happened during that time was that the consultant read the code
and traced its thread of execution. It took two hours to make and test
the change, time billable for a total of $110. If we assume that
self-documenting code could have reduced the research time by half, the
cost for making a minor change to the program drops by $220. The point
is that self-documenting code reduces the cost of owning a software
system considerably. Variable names figure into that cost reduction as a
significant factor."

So, good practices save time and money. Formalised, structured,
standardised, training and certification, can increase the use of good
practices, and, the confidence that good practices will be used, and,
therefore, the confidence of efficiency.

It is like the use of the CMMI assessment for software developers, be
they small businesses, or corporations.

I attended a .NET Community Of Practice seminar, a few months ago, and
encountered a concept of which I was not previously aware, and I am not
sure of the name for it; where a form allows SQL code instead of values,
to be input into an input field in a form, allowing hacking into the
database. The seminar warned against allowing such security breaches,
and, mentioned various options and best ways of performing tasks. And,
no, I am not of the .NET world, but, I learnt from the seminar. The
inclusion of such issues, in formalised training, would also increase
public confidence in software, which I understand to be one of the
issues in software engineering.

Formalised, standardised, structured, training and certification, can
increase a prospective employer's confidence, both that an employee is
more than just a hack-programmer, and, that the employee, apart from
having a reasonable idea of what the employee is doing, does what the
employee is supposed to do, properly, and most efficiently, producing
the most reliable and efficient result.


> > If you cannot see the advantages of formalised, structured, standardised
> > training and certification, then I assume that you have no
> > qualifications, and did not graduate from secondary school?
>
> Well this was just plain snobbish. There are benefits to secondary
> school but they do not pertain to each individual and it has been
> proven time and time again that secondary school (college) can actually
> hamper the minds, creativity and capabilities for a person to grown.
> Bill Gates, and Michael Dell come to mind.
>
> The above of course is not par for the course for everyone. Some people
> need to be taught, some can teach themselves, some can only teach
> themselves within one arena of talent, some are complete morons... it
> depends on the individual.
>

It, surely, is all about the basic principle of public education;
ensuring that people are educated to the same level(s). That is the
great advantage - being educated to prescribed levels, nd, in knowing
that a person has been educated to a particular leve, and therefore,
attributing a particular level of skills to the person.

>
> > Such things
> > are generally implemented at secondary school and further education, and
> > Informix and Oracle and Microsoft have such things, from my
> > understanding.
>
> As someone who has passed the MS exams, you don't need them, they are
> joke. The A+ was more difficult than the memorize the side bars and
> select letter "C" testing that Microsoft offers.
>
>

Did you complete the MCAD and MCSD courses?

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams,
  published by Pan Books, 1992
....................................................