Related link: http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/10/0055227&mode=flat&tid=9

Many people may want a Perl certification, but how many people want to be the one who is legally liable for the certificant who messes up? Remember, a lawsuit does not need to have merit to mess up your life. All I see in this announcement is that a lot of people want a certificate. Let’s see how many people want to take the call from a lawyer for a company that gets burned. Nobody I know who has ever proposed this idea has said anything like “My attorney said I need to do this and this and this to certify a person”. That shows me that no one has really thought about this .

Perl certification is not going to magically create jobs. I still see top notch Perl developers virtually begging for work. One more unknown certificate on their resume is not going to make that any better for them, and it is not going to make it better for people who are relatively unknown. Open source programmers are more likely to be judged by their reputation, their profile in Google, and their available source, unlike something like a Microsoft NT admin or Cisco router engineer, which are really just work-a-day jobs with little chance of recognition or fame.

Certification programs make money for companies selling certificates, and in my opinion they are just a way to extract money from people who need it for other things. At Stonehenge we can certify that you took one of our courses, but we do not certify anyone as Perl programmers. Potential employers can ask for references, and that is more telling than some certificate.

In my opinion, to truly certify someone as competent, you have to work with them for an extended period of time and evaluate them in a variety of cicumstances and from multiple perspectives. A single test will not do that. People will study for the test (just look at all the study guides out there), just like they do for any other test. You will only test the test.

If you want a certificate, I am sure Nat can print you one at the next TPC, just like the last time this topic was debated, and, like last time this topic was killed, and I responded on the Perl advocacy list, I will make sure the world knows that I think Perl certificates are a worthless scam perpetuated to extract money from unsuspecting candidates to fool naive human resources departments.

There is absolutely no good reason that people should have to pay to get a job using an open source tool, but that is the culture that certificate programs will engender.