Frankly, programming is pretty easy for a motivated student.

Of course, being a good programmer — that’s a different story, I imagine. How do you get there if you don’t want to waste time with a cs degree? Certs had recommended themselves as an answer — and they have gotten me interviews.

I just had a phone interview with a guy quizzing me from a Java book — I’ve got a bunch of java certs — but he was determined to find my skills inadequate. He asked me what I could do starting day one: I told him if he gave me a bunch of test cases I could use my certified knowledge of standard Java to build libraries — then he shifted to ask me if I knew spring/hibernate. this kind of bluffing is sadly typical of my interaction with the community — even on a personal level with programmer friends!

The point I’d like to make — with a little venom, yes — is that the posture of the programming industry is intrinsically hostile and deprecating, so how could the general opinion of certs even be neutral?

But of course, the reader is wise enough to appreciate all that’s left unsaid.

Lille

What I said is that I believe that there’s a negative correlation between developer certifications and the people I end up hiring. I’ve also said that seeing a Certified Scrum Developer certificate would reduce my chances of interviewing somebody. It’s not a huge factor, but it definitely costs people points in my eyes.

I don’t think that’s discrimination, which generally means unfair or prejudicial treatment. When sorting resumes, the whole point is to judge people on a statistical basis. As a hiring manager, my job isn’t to be maximally fair to applicants; it’s to maximize the chance of getting great people for the minimum amount of work. If I gave every applicant an equal chance, I would have to spend 50x as much time on interviews, which is not happening.

I should mention that I don’t have any problem with people getting degrees, or other meaningful evaluations of their work; I’m in fact in favor of that. BS, BA, MS, JD, CFA? All great by me. I’m also entirely in favor of people taking classes, including classes on Scrum. Seeing classes on a resume is a big plus to me, almost as good as hobby development projects.

However, I’ve never seen a developer certification that has any evaluative weight to it. From what I have read, the CSD won’t either. Ergo, when I see a resume that foregrounds low-grade certifications as if they matter, I will continue to be concerned that the person who made the resume has different enough values than me that they are not a good match for my teams.

The problem is that this not clear to both the person holding the certificate nor thousands of employers. IMHO this is intensionally kept in the dark, else majority of the people would stop wasting their money on such gimmicks.

Also when one has to find needles from haystack, the certificate becomes a filtration criteria. Which forces people who don’t hold the certificate to get one. And this is where the problem starts. The certificate becomes a mere entity to satisfy the filtration criteria for a job. IMHO it losses its original purpose.

Also I come across a lot of people in companies who force their (dumb) ideas on others claiming that they hold so-and-so certificate and hence they have the knowledge and right to make the decision.

In many other industries people have come up with skill based certificate which at least makes some sense to me.