Colin Vipurs

Some time back—it must have been around the mid-noughties—one of my friends had taken and passed the Java Certified Programmer exam with an impressive score of 98%. Eager to keep up, I took one of the practice tests during a lunch break and, although I didn’t score as high, I got a passing grade. One question on the exam has always stuck in my mind. It was to do with the inheritance hierarchy in Swing applications, something I had no problem answering as my day job was working with Swing, but it did strike me as odd to ask something that could easily be looked up in your IDE. I never did get around to taking the exam, mostly due to being partway through studying for my master’s degree at the time.

Fast-forward a few years, and I had just started a new job. During the first week, I was asked by one of my new colleagues if I was Java 5 certified. “No,” I replied, “but I have been using it for the last year.” Turns out he was certified, so good news for me that someone on my team would have a base level of knowledge and skill. It was less than two weeks later that he asked why we have to bother overriding hashCode when we override equals. He genuinely didn’t understand the relationship between the two methods. This was just the tip of what he didn’t know, yet he was certified!

Fast-forward another few years, and I’m contracting at a place where the company policy was that every permanent employee be certified, at least to what was then the Java Certified Programmer level. I did meet some good developers there, and good developers had passed through the ranks, but there were some truly awful developers as well—all of whom were certified.

A quick look at the Oracle site for Java Certification tells you that being certified will “Help you position yourself with validation that you posses the full skill set and knowledge to be a Professional Java Developer” and “Earn you more credibility, help you perform better in your daily job, and lead your team and company forward.” Rubbish. Being a “professional developer” and performing “better in your day job” have little to do with what you’ll need in order to become certified. You can learn enough to pass the exams without ever writing a line of code. As an industry, we can’t even definitively tell you what “good” and “bad” are, so a piece of paper claiming to do so is worthless.

There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. I have met a few people—well, at least one—who have used Java certification as a way to bolster their own knowledge. They used it as a way to learn things they otherwise wouldn’t have had to as part of their day job, and to those people I take my hat off. In over twenty years of writing software professionally, one thing about certifications has never changed: the good developers don’t need it, but the bad ones can easily achieve it.