Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Stinking Silver Badges

ACM News Service: Why Certifying IT Workers Won't Help.  It is difficult to determine what non-anecdotal value arises in this blurb's suggestion that failures can happen anyhow.  I suppose it is like rejecting fire insurance because there are still fires.  Of course, we don't know of the failures that were avoided through disciplined software engineering.

Martin Brampton's 2004-04-27 ZDNet commentary earned some interesting comments, but the article doesn't go very deep.  It is a little mind-wrenching to see how Dijkstra's Go To Considered Harmful supports a crucial argument about the irrelevance of certification.  While there are appropriate concerns about the reliability of examinations as demonstrations of engineering competence, Brampton proposes no measurable alternative.  Indeed, it doesn't look like Brampton proposes to measure anything.  Good, we will keep it all in the domain of opinion, the approach that has taken us this far.  Bully.
posted by Dennis at 5/18/2004 04:55:46 PM