solving 61 Exam not mean to you will be good developer in java technology. The good product or project denpencies with The skills of computer programming

I got my SCJP and SCWCD couple years ago. My first try with SCJP failed miserably with something like 50% correct. That was really embarassing since I had already been programming complex j2ee applications for years. After that I read the Java Language Spec. and JVM Spec. and retook the test. Still didn't get perfect scrore, but it was a clear pass with about 90% right. That was really useful and has helped my to solve bugs in software I have maintained and it has also made me always read the specification first and then maybe some books about a subject. So in a sense it was useful to get that certificate.

how many things in your A-level or GCSE are useful in your daily work? and can you ask your university not required it, as you already in school for some years(10-12), just like you have experience as a java developer; but maybe just not the good one at all.

the SCJP one is concentrate on the fundmental of the knowledge, pass this means only you know the basic, does not means you can solve real business problem, this is why SCJD, SCWCD and others go on top of this one.

OH PUHLEASE....
who is this guy David Huang...
His post is not even in the context of certification.
hire guys from schools like Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, UCSD etc and get them to write JSP's, and EJB's, HA HA HA...
Keep it real guys...

I think all people who think certification is a waste of time, or certification is useless, READ THIS...

First and foremost, lets not generalize and say guys who have certifications are bookish, or bad programmers or textbook programmers and stuff like that.
There are good programmers and bad programmers and it is all about logic, common sense and ofcourse a good grasp of the fundamentals.
Now if you can give an exam and see if your fundamentals are as good as u think they are, then isint that a good thing.

I can safely say that anyone who can pass SCXXX (where XXX stands for all flavours ) without preparing for it is great.
For most of us who dont fall into this category, spend some time, study a little and find out how much u dont know :)

Try giving the SCEA and then talk of certifications not being good for you, Preparing for and passing the SCEA has given me loads of knowledge, confidence and most importantly insights into the BIG picture. It has made me a better designer and architect.

Bottom Line : Certifications help you become better than you already are.

Certifications are for companies to make money, they do not prove ability and employers ignore them by giving their own tests anyway. The questions on these tests focus on useless syntax that has very little to do with makes someone a good software engineer. The ability to manipulate logic, simplify problems, follow instructions, ask the right questions, work with a team, learn and work under pressure are far more important. I'd rather hire someone that excelled at those things but has little Java experience than hire someone that has a useless certification they spent weeks taking practice tests for so they could pass.

Certifications are often of limited usefulness (unlike degrees) because the questions are often too contrived, inflexible and even bogus, also certifications should not be used as a 'cop-out' selection criteria for know nothing HR staff, recruiting should be done by the manager for the position, because it is part of their job and they should know what is required.

I was studying years ago for the JCP, but saw how bogus some of the mock questions were (from actual JCP questions) and even proved that some of the 'perfect answers' were plain wrong, so stopped in disgust!

Just my 2 cents:
"... makes you think like a compiler ..." well not quite...
An ability to took at badly written code, that does not work, and catch errors, don't you think you would like your developers to be able to do that. (not necessarily compiler errors, it seems that the developers these days operate on a principle "if it compiles it's GA, ship it!").

IDE's are great (I use eclipse), but like all technology they will not think for you, you ask an IDE to make a an inefficient construct and it will happily generate it for you. Everyone forgets , when you are writing lots and lots of code, stop, you probably doing something wrong , either you chose the wrong language or a bad algorithm, etc. (I once replaced a HUGE Java program with a thirty line AWK script), IDE obfuscates the actual amount of code you are creating so you wind up going in the wrong direction longer... A programmer (Java or otherwise ) should know how to code without an IDE, does not mean we should not use it, but do not become so dependant on it you become helpless without it.

When I interview, (i do tech interviews from time to time) -- I do not ask method signatures (you all are right, that's what API Javadoc is for), but I do ask interviewee the difference between List and Set, also examples of each and under which circumstances they will use one over the other. I also ask about access modifiers, you'd be surprised how many C++ answers I get :). I also ask about interfaces / frameworks, it's sad, Java is so easy to code in a reusable fashion, but so few people do it.

I don't care what someone's personal preferences are on threading,(I did not realize that this is a religious issue like where to put your opening "{" ),there is lots of technology out there that can handle threading for you, application servers, JMS providers, etc, but you should be able to tell me how it's done in plain Java, so I know you could use it when necessary. (How could you code a JSP/Servlet while not keeping it in the back of your mind?) It seems rather improbable that a large project with lots of concurrent users could avoid some kind of threading technology, unless of course, you have an infinite hardware budget :). BTW VB(.NET) developers are not immune to threading, although Microsoft makes very difficult to use it effectively.

In general I would prefer to hire a developer that knows less (but is willing to learn) to the one that knows everything.

Sun's Java Programmer exam is not something you could do "on the fly", but if you worked with the language for a couple of years it should not take more than two to three weeks to get ready to pass it. Yeah I took it, (I had a couple of weeks free in the beginning of the year), I passed it, but to my horror I did not get a perfect score :(.

Nick

P.S. I have about 16 years in the business (I started with Java in mid 99 I learned it from Bruce Eckle's Thinking in Java http://www.mindview.net I highly recommend it),

P.P.S I found that taking the exam organized my thinking, helped me explain myself better, and gave me a perspective that I did not have before...

HTH

Thanks Jeffrey Haskovec for his reply.

Walking through the list with iterator vs. get(i) method should take roughly the same time for ArrayList, because iterator object is pretty light. But what happens if the list is an instance of LinkedList? Do you realize that get(100) may take about 100 times more time than get(1)?

That guy on the interview believed that get() is the only way to go through the list (I cpecifically asked him). He did not even suspect that there exist List implementations other than ArrayList. Do you?

I fully agree that it is much more important to know where to find answers than to know some answers. And it is important to know the questions. Learn to think about what you are doing.

If somebody is programming Java for a few years, uses List, ArrayList and HashMap, but never heard of LinkedList and do not know how to use iterator, it means that he or she never looks in the book or online documentation and/or does the job without thinking. I would never hire such person.

This reply is for Leonid Ilyevsky... Your statement about the Iterator is ridiculous. It is more inefficient to use the iterator in your example than what the guy did, as if you read the Java Source code you will see in Abstract list that when you call an iterator it is effectivly doing the same thing. So basically you just created a new object (the iterator) to call the same things your candidate did by hand. He avoided additional Garbage collection overhead as well as an additional call layer by doing it directly. So to me that says you are dumping someone who writes better performing code. I am sure a lot of people here will be like what is the big deal it is just 1 more object, but on our server application we need it to be fast as possible and Garbage collection can just kill us when we are under heavy load (even with the parallel collectors on multiprocessor machines). So in certain applications it does matter. What I tend to see is a lot of programmers who take an ivory tower view to how they are writing something ot whatever is the accepted abstract trendy thing to do at the time, but I feel in the real world we need to be more pragmatic based on application considerations.

Let me add my .02 cents.

1. Certification is good as an additional testing tool to double check that you understood the book correctly.

2. From the vendor's perspective the whole certification process is a business that generates some additional revenue.

3. From the employer's perspective this is useful in two cases:
a) a job agency does not have people to screen job applicants and the very fact that someone has certification
helps them with the first screening.

b) A tool/language is new on the market and it's hard to find the right people. This was applicable to Java
back in 1996-1998.

4. I agree with Frank Employer that people who know where to find the answer are more valuable than people who know some
number of answers.

5. While having a good formal education is a good thing in general, for business application development it's
not critical. You can have a degree in music and be a good programmer and write good Java/HTML/XML/SQL code.

6. When interviewing developers, I just ignore the fact of having any Java certification .
It's neither good, nor bad.

I work at Sun and too believe that the exams are a bunch of crap. Don't take them if you don't have to. They've never gotten a reputation for being a career-enhancer for anyone...

"It is better to know some of the questions than all the answers" - James Thurber. This is the quote our onsite Sun Consultant has at the end of his emails. When we ask him the tough questions that are not intuitively obvious, his response is "I don't know the answer, but I know where to find it".

Isn't this a better indicator of value than regurgitating 40 answers on a test. I've been in the software development business for over 35 years and have a plethora of languages under my belt, COBOL, ALGOL, Fortran, C, C++, and the list goes on. Conceptually, you can do the same things in each of these languages, albeit, some things are easier in one versus another. What we as developers need to do is convert business requirements into language statement that meet those requirements. Amazingly, I've seen a significant number of developers, including certified developers, that can not do that. Regardless of certification tests that one passes, bottom line, being able to walk the walk coupled with a good work ethic, the ability to work with others, compromise, etc., all all important attributes for any good employee to have.

The ability to take requirements and translate them into well structured, maintenance free code, is an acquired talent and from my perspective, not one you can get from a certification. Certainly as an interpreter, I better know how to interpret, i.e., speak and understand the Java language of threads, and pipes, and steams, oh my. I wouldn't be much of an English to French interpreter if I didn't know French, would I. Knowing and understanding language constructs are essentials, reguritating them is not.

To keep up on technology, I regularly take university classes. The same concept seems to apply there as to certification tests, i.e., it's not necessary to know how to apply a technology, that is secondary, it's more can I reguritate 40 answers to some lame test for a grade. The emphaaahsis is on understanding and applying. It's sad we miss this point at such an early development stage, but hey, it's not a perfect world. How did Paul Simon put it? "If I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, I'm amazed that I can think at all". I now audit all these courses.

To quote, Max Klinger from MASH ... "If I had all the answers I'd be God". Same goes for employers hiring employees. I think the point of this article is that certification is not the be all, end all, answer to making a hiring decision, and that perhaps this certification thing is a bit overblown. If that was the intent then, in general, I think the author makes some good arguments. But, I didn't get from this article that the author discounted certifications, just questioned its overall importance in the grand scheme of things. Guarenteed, no matter how hard employers try, they will still get some turkeys. Certifications is just one aspect of risk management, but not all of them.

I'm happy to say that I've never made a bad hiring decision in my life. For technical positions, in several hires I took on an All American Soccer player, a professional hockey player, a musician, and a factory worker, all with little experience and all with human traits that made them not just good, but exceptional employees. In our ever evolving dehumanized world, it is still as important as ever to consider the person and not to become too enamored with their certifications. But I digress ...

Wow! So many good points in all the comments. "To be or not to be" Certified?

I enjoyed reading the article, the Author made some very good points. I agree his thread comment was discouraging. Certifications show that someone can read the study material and mindlessly regurgitate from short term memory. They do not show that someone can develop software. I think a spot quiz at an interview that asks What is the main signature? does not prove a thing. Asking an interviewee to write a hello world program in notepad also does not prove anything. For Dave Howard, who comments on my Birthday, And if you can't write a hello world class from scratch using notepad, then you should be embarrassed, I say, You should be embarrassed for asking someone to code using notepad. (by the way there are 2 rs in embarrassed)

I do not know of any developer who does not code with some sort of IDE. I have not written public static void main(String[] args) ever. Like most of my fellow software developers we cut and paste. We allow the IDE to correct syntax errors on the fly, we allow the IDE to insert the correct import statements, we allow the IDE to do whatever it can to allow us to focus our energy on writing top quality code.

I have been on more interviews than I can remember. I now bring two books with me when I interview, Bruce Eckel Thinking in Java 3rd edition and Java 2 Exam Cram by Bill Brogden. During the interview I have opened the books and answered the interviewers question. I get some very strange looks, I do explain that the question they asked is right out of the book. I do not remember everything I read and spew it out like a genius, I do remember most of what I read and what book I read it in. Knowing where to find information is a key factor to producing good quality code. Knowing how to apply the information makes for great quality code.

And for Leonid Ilyevsky, Iterator is great for going through the elements in a collection especially if you want to remove one, however using a for loop is possibly faster if you just want to quickly list out all the elements. I have not done any performance testing on this, but it seems logical that it would be. Personally I always use Iterator.

I also would like to put in my own two cents. Until certifications move away from book knowledge (stuff that is readily available in a book) and more towards problem solving, we will keep having software products that do not meet the mark.

I thank you for your time in publishing the original story and the time the readers take to read my own comments.

The author makes an unjustified leap. The starting premise is that the SCJP doesn't test a lot of the things that make a good software developer; that is, of course true. The leap attempts to conclude that the certification is therefore useless, and it falls short.

Perhaps the author is a fine developer, but it certainly is useful for this potential employer to know that they would be hiring someone whose knowledge of the Java language itself is a bit shaky. If an employer misinterprets the results of the SCJP exam, that's the employer's problem, not the test's problem. I interview for job positions, and it helps me to see the SCJP on someone's resume for an entry-level position. It's pointless for an experienced position, of course.

Ditto others' comments about the SCJD and other further certifications.

In short, I agree with those who find knowledge of basics very important. I got my SCJP and SCJD in 1999 and found it helpful. Before coming to software business I did PhD in math, so I know how useful the fundamental knowledge can be.

I want to specifically comment on John Jaster who says "... they are trying to substitute read-a-book learning for real world experience". I found that the opposite may be even more dangerous. The effect of "real world experience" depends on who you work with. We all know that the work done in many places cannot be described as "good practice". Young developers coming to such place may think that this is the way to write programs. And then, after a while, the not so good practice becomes a real disaster.

I was recently interviewing candidates for a Java position, so here is a real life example. I asked the guy about collections, he was not sure what I was talking about. So I said, "Did you use maps or lists ?", and he said, "Yeah, we used lists for small number of objects and maps for big number". Why? "Because hash maps are more efficient than lists". I was somewhat puzzled by this explanation, so I asked him to write a few lines and show me how to go through the list and do something for every object. So he wrote something like:

for(int i = 0; i < mylist.size(); i++) {
Object obj = mylist.get(i);
....................
}

?????????? What happened to iterators? No wonder lists are really inefficient in some places.

Unfortunately, many candidates had very poor understanding of what the programming is all about. But I an sure they know their IDE. It also seemed to me that they were pretty arrogant coming to the interview without even opening the book, probably hoping that they will not be asked technical questions.

I admit, one of those bad candidates was SUN certified. I don't know how he got that, it does not matter. I agree that certificate itself is not a guarantee of better quality. You still need to test people yourself.

So, folks, please, open the book and learn. It will not hurt. Apply your own brain and use your judgment. Maybe real GURUs know everything even without the book (I doubt that), but GURUs cannot do all the work. Remember about junior guys next to you, teach them. They can be really helpful when they know the stuff. Otherwise you will end up redoing their work.