On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Dister Kemp <dister.k...@gmail.com> wrote: > Vagmim, > Great analysis. > Thanks a lot.
> Opensource is all great, but still I hope you do acknowledge > the fact that big names like M$, Oracle, Sun (well.. now Oracle) > dominate the space as well. So certification is a value-addition > in some sense. > Agreed. I am just trying to explain the economics behind it. But tell me. If you are hiring, which do you think is better? A guy with an active blog about his experiences and learnings of whatever technology he is working on or a guy who just has a certificate on his resume. The problem is that there are so many people doing certifications the wrong way (read dumps) that the marginal value of the certificate is close to zero. One other reason why most certifications are multiple choice questions is that the test can be cheaply administered to a large number of candidates. The marginal cost for the organization to hand out yet another certificate is the cost to store your certificate details and the printout of the certificate they give. In contrast, you pay several tens of thousands to get that database entry and a printed parchment. You must understand that certification is a viable and profitable revenue source for a company like MS/Oracle/Sun. They will never tell you that their certificates are worthless. You might gain some knowledge by preparing for such a test but you do not have to pay them that money. You can use that knowledge in building something on your own and sharing your experience via a blog. All the companies that you mentioned above are critically aware that developers and administrators are the backbone of their ecosystem. All of them give away free versions of their software under educational license. Even Microsoft has dirt cheap/free student licenses. Oracle gives away their database for free for personal use. Solaris and the Java stack is free for developers. There is nothing that justifies a high price for the certification. Now coming to the choice of technologies, let me put forth this argument. Why would you want to get certified in Java/Sun/Oracle? You want to be employed by one of the companies using these products. You have to get into the minds of the managers who buy such products. These products clearly cost more and are harder to customize. ASP.NET begets with it the entire stack. I have seen companies who think ah.. IIS is free until they find the need to configure DNS and active directory and SQL Server licensing limitations. They are ready to bear the cost because they know that they can get cheap developers and admins to offset the cost on the license. Consequently, most of the ASP.NET sites are crap. Not because the technology is inferior but the marketing machinery is optimized for targeting the largest section of the market. This in other words is called mediocrity. It is a fail-fail for everyone. MS fails as people know that asp.net sites are very maintenance heavy. The client fails to get a quality solution and vendor is stuck forever with mediocre people. Every one of the company you mentioned above targets this segment of the market. All I ask of is for people to realize this. We are hackers and we like to create things. That is what gives us satisfaction. And building things requires you to focus single handedly on that task. This is the discipline that is most required out of current generation of students. They need to focus on one project, use all the resources that they can exploit and finish it. This is way harder than it sounds and thats why many people do not do it. This is why I made the offer of being a mentor. I can help them to focus and provide them with the resources with the best of my abilities. Basically I want to find smart people and train them on how to get things done. My intentions are not entirely altruistic. I do have a selfish motive behind this. I would be able to identify good candidates in this process and can build my team. The interns get to work on a real project and show it to the world. It is a win-win situation. > -D > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email ilugc-requ...@ae.iitm.ac.in with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
