> >>And, one can always study on one's own and show competency by demonstration, which is a time honored method in the programmers tradition. >>JLK > (warning, rank sarcasm ahead) > >WHAT????? > >Jerry, now it seems you're out to destroy In$titute$ of higher learning, too? > >First you promote the "Open Source movement" which according to St. Billy "has a 'goal' of destroying proprietary software vendors" and now you blatantly attack the ivory column, hallowed halls of "Smarts for Bucks". > >Have you no shame, man? > >Well put, and I agree with you completely. Certification is an HR ploy to C their own A. > >Mike C
It was necessity for me, Mike. When I was in grad school Fortran 64 was the only language taught and a CS degree and/or curriculum didn't exist except at Berkely and Perdu. The first CS grad degree was introduced in 1968, the year I graduated grad school, and their first graduates didn't roll out till around 1971. If you weren't self taught on computer languages you never learned!
It's a so much easier now to pick up a new language because there are so many well written books on every language or GUI RAD Dev tool. My experience with 5 day training sessions are that they are too expensive, go too fast, are too shallow, and if the teacher isn't any good or has limited experience they are a total waste of money. We had a VMF instructor who wasted three days of our time because he didn't know the tool he was trying to teach. VMF is a fine framework but even a Caddy can be rolled over by an inexperienced driver. We never adopted it. In fact, we have begun the long process of switching to Oracle, but we will be maintaining VFP apps for at least 10 years. It wouldn't suprise me if I retire as the last VFP coder at the dept of Revenue.
