July 8, 2008 at 11:21 am
Loner (7/4/2008)
To G^2 - a degree is very different from a certification. Getting a degree, you have to go to college, taking classes, for master and PHD, you need to spend so much time in research, besides in college you are not just taking your major classes, you take all kind of classes in different subject. Sometimes people major in one thing but they still work in IT area. I knew many good programmers that went to college and major in totally different areas - one major in marine biology and one major in music, they were the best programmers I saw. On the other hand, I saw some major in computer science and they were the worst programmers I ever knew.A cert is just saying you are specialize in one area or even one product. One of my co-worker just went to a Microsoft boot camp for a week and became MCSD. He took the class for a couple days and then took the exam. I don't think anyone can get any degree in a boot camp!!!!!
I must have missed something in my own post. I don't see anywhere that I equate degrees with certs.
I do hold both in comparable respect in many cases. ("With all due respect," doesn't mean as much as some people seem to think.) But I do know the difference between them.
Since I'm uncertified (but probably "certifiable" in some senses of that word), and am both a kindergarden and college drop-out (not many can manage both!), I'm not exactly writing from a position of authority on either subject. However, I had to teach someone how to use Ctrl-Alt-Del a few years ago, when she was less than a month away from her Bachelors of Computer Science degree (with a B+ average grade). I had to fix a proc written by someone with a ton of database alphabet-soup after his name, because he didn't know how to write outer joins and ended up merging a dozen temp tables together, using nested cursors, in order to do one left outer join between three tables. Yesterday, I taught two people with database certs how to write CTEs and how to use Row_Number and Partition By. The list goes on.
On the other hand, I know one of the first thousand people to get the MSCDBA cert, and man does he know SQL! Serious l337 skillz! Has a bad habit of using int where he should use bit, but beyond that eccentricity, he writes amazingly performant code, well-commented, and he was incredibly helpful to me when I was first learning SQL. Quick developer too, and easy to write specs for. I could go on, but you get the point.
I won't generalize and say "all people with certs are morons", or "all people with degrees are mouth-breathing ignoramuses (ignoramusi?)". My point is that there are smart, competent people, with and without certs and/or degrees, and there are ignorant, stupid, incompetent people, with and without certs and/or degrees.
The same thing happens in all human endeavors. I used to know a lawyer who had a degree and all that, but he ended up being disbarred in seven states. And, while I could be mistaken, I am under the impression that Shakespear did not have a degree in English Lit. 🙂 On the opposite side, Oppenheimer had a PhD. It goes all ways, in all fields.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
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