Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

On Certifications

I’m in the pro­cess of chan­ging jobs at the moment, and have been struck by the dif­fi­culties inher­ent in try­ing to quantify exper­i­ence and skill in people mov­ing between com­pan­ies in the web devel­op­ment sector.

I cur­rently carry the job title of “Senior Web Developer”, but my skills are on a par with — and in many cases inferior to — many of the folks I work with. And I’m the only one with “Senior Web Developer” in my email sig­na­ture. It’s right above the liab­il­ity dis­claimer and the bit about please god think of the trees. But in the com­pany I’m mov­ing to, I’m going to be “Developer”, or maybe “Front-End Developer” — we haven’t decided yet. So where did the “Senior” bit go?

In some com­pan­ies, the use of “senior” or “junior” is used to con­note exper­i­ence, and in some it’s designed to indic­ate man­age­ment struc­ture. In the former, you can expect a Senior Whatever to be wiser than a Junior Whatever (or just a Whatever) in their chosen field; in the lat­ter, Senior might tell Junior what to do, but in the know­ledge that Junior can prob­ably do it bet­ter than him. That’s essen­tially where my par­tic­u­lar “Senior” comes from in this case.

So you’d be right to ima­gine that this lowers the value of “senior” when attempt­ing to com­pare roles in dif­fer­ent com­pan­ies, as each com­pany has a dif­fer­ent idea of what “seni­or­ity” con­sti­tutes. The com­pany that I’m mov­ing to (all will be revealed once I’ve put sig­na­ture to paper) took quite a while in decid­ing whether or not to hire me, partly because the exper­i­ence I have (var­ied, but cent­ring around PHP) doesn’t neatly dove­tail with their choice of tech­no­lo­gies (cent­ring around Python). In mak­ing their decision they had to com­pare my skills with the skills of other can­did­ates, many of whom were Pythonistas already, and fig­ure out who would be the best fit. By some stroke of good for­tune, they picked me.

My father has been a chartered sur­veyor for some­thing like thirty years, and it was dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with him on the pro­gress of my job hunt that I real­ised just how eso­teric and impreg­nable the world of IT and IT skills must seem to those in other pro­fes­sions. A sur­vey­ing com­pany like the one my dad works for can inter­view a gradu­ate of Building Surveying or Civil Engineering or whatever and be sure to within some degree of pre­ci­sion what that per­son may or may not know about their field. After a given num­ber of years work­ing as a sur­veyor, you can reas­on­ably expect to be earn­ing a cer­tain amount, and this amount pro­gresses with fairly appar­ent constancy.

As a sur­veyor mov­ing between com­pan­ies, your years on the job will be assessed and used as a bench­mark for what you should, and prob­ably do know. I don’t know much about sur­vey­ing, but I’m under the impres­sion that most of your work as a sur­veyor takes the form of prac­tices and pro­ced­ures that have been honed over hun­dreds, pos­sibly thou­sands of years, and that (and I’m inten­tion­ally gen­er­al­ising here) there are gen­er­ally very few accep­ted ways to crack a nut while on the job. As it were.

Contrast, then, with web devel­op­ment (just one facet of IT, mind), where there are a whole bunch of widely used back-end lan­guages (PHP, ASP.NET, Java, Python, Ruby and Perl to name a few), a vari­ety of front-end dis­cip­lines (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc) and vari­ous other interim bits (MySQL, Flash/ActionScript, Silverlight, node.js, XML/XSLT etc), not to men­tion a pleth­ora of tools within your chosen lan­guage (e.g. PHP’s many MVC frame­works: CakePHP, Lithium, CodeIgniter, Symfony etc), and sud­denly your elev­ator pitch that starts with “I have three years of web devel­op­ment exper­i­ence” doesn’t mean a whole lot.

And you can add to that the fact that (and this applies to gen­eral programming/software engin­eer­ing as well) you could be self-taught or a gradu­ate; could have spent those three years in a big com­pany or a small com­pany; could have spent them jock­ey­ing with cutting-edge stuff or putter­ing along with leg­acy tech and mak­ing good money either way, and “three years exper­i­ence” is even less read­ily trans­lat­able to actual skill.

All this got me think­ing about cer­ti­fic­a­tions, some­thing that other indus­tries lean on quite heav­ily. To re-use my earlier example, sur­vey­ors can become mem­bers of their industry’s pro­fes­sional body, RICS, and being a Fellow of RICS (FRICS) means some­thing. Likewise hav­ing a degree in Building Surveying means you’re pretty much guar­an­teed to know the right things about Building Surveying. For my part, I have a degree that’s half Comp Sci, half Business, but rarely does it come up in inter­views and I don’t think I’ve ever got a job because of it.

I’ve worked with extremely skilled people with a large vari­ety of degrees, many of them unre­lated to IT and many of them cer­tainly unre­lated to web devel­op­ment, and plenty of folks with no degree at all. My point being, unless you’re the hard­est of hard-core soft­ware engin­eers, your degree doesn’t have much bear­ing on what you can do. So the degree, as a cer­ti­fic­a­tion, doesn’t carry much weight when it comes to web development.

So what do we have? If you spe­cial­ise in Microsoft tech­no­lo­gies (e.g. ASP.NET) you can get an MSCE, or an MVP; if you do a lot of work with Cisco net­work­ing tech you might find your­self tak­ing a course to gain a CCNA (I’m told this is a much big­ger deal than the MS certs I just men­tioned). But these are sort of spe­cific and, not least, of lim­ited rel­ev­ance to web dev. So is there much else out there for web developers? Well, it seems, not really. A quick search reveals a few ideas, and a few half-assed attempts by jokers like W3Schools, but mostly people ask­ing the same ques­tion, and not much of any substance.

What if there was? What would these cer­ti­fic­a­tions look like? How about an OWASP cert¹ to sig­nify your know­ledge of web app secur­ity? How about a Web Standards Professional cert, that shows your com­mit­ment and adher­ence to web stand­ards? How about being cer­ti­fied an Accessible Web Contributor, show­ing your ongo­ing desire to cre­ate access­ible products? Responsive Designer? High Performance Scaling Engineer? That one sounds like action.

You’ll note that these examples don’t refer to spe­cific tech­no­lo­gies, and while that was sort of by acci­dent, it rep­res­ents a valid point. Too many qual­i­fic­a­tions today mean next to noth­ing a short while down the line. So if we were to invent the above, we’d have to take pains to keep them tool-agnostic. Web devel­op­ment is one of the fast­est mov­ing sec­tors around, with dozens of new tech­no­lo­gies being released every year, so any cer­ti­fic­a­tion would need to be designed with that in mind — cer­ti­fy­ing prin­ciples rather than pack­ages. Principles change too, but at a far lower rate than oper­a­tional tech.

Companies seem to deal with the “com­par­ab­il­ity gap” by put­ting their hires through tech­nical tests, but it seems that only “in the field” does a person’s abil­ity become appar­ent. Many com­pan­ies now seem to take on new hires as con­tract­ors on one– or three-month con­tracts, offer­ing them a per­man­ent role if their trial run works out. This seems like a sens­ible strategy, but I can’t help but think cer­ti­fic­a­tion would be a use­ful arrow in the quiver at selec­tion time.

Who would admin­is­trate these certs? How much would they cost to acquire, if any­thing? These are ques­tions on which the whole thing would live or die, and I don’t really know, but inter­ested to hear ideas. What do you think — would this be some­thing worth hav­ing for our industry? Answers on a postcard.

1. A bit of research reveals that this was on the draw­ing board for a while, but doesn’t seem to have seen the light of day. [↩]