Hi Josh, I agree and disagree at the same time ;-) I agree that certificates generally are being abused or does not really say anything in Kenya, in many cases you simply get a certificate for nothing. "Certificate that person X has participated in activity Y" - it tells you nothing other than that person was able to actually show up for whatever was happening. In true spirit of Generation Y (aka. the Trophy generation - everyone gets a trophy). Within my limited time in Kenya I have personally already acquired two "certificates", without having to demonstrate any understanding or skill-level. I disagree that that Chipuka is the same thing - or at least it is not intended to be (lets see when it goes live), the significant difference here is that it requires you do demonstrate hands-on developer skills - as mentioned earlier it is of-course important to know exactly what those requirements, when evaluating any potential staff. I have witnessed quite a few Kenyan IT-graduates, who did not understand loops and arrays i.e. the very basics of programming, how that is even possible is almost a mystery to me. My best guess is that either there are too few hands-on assignments in the university, or everything is "group-work" and that each group has 1-2 people who understands how to code, and the rest are just free-riding - anyway I don't know. .. Michael Pedersen On 2/13/12 6:53 AM, Josh Handley wrote:
After having spent a pretty significant part of the last year and half recruiting software engineers here in Nairobi it seems to me that on average Kenyan developers already have five or ten time times the number of certifications that developers in the US do. At the same time, based on my technical evaluations of the candidates I've seen, software engineering talent seems to be inversely related to the number of certifications. It has gotten to the point where I count certifications against the candidate when I look at their CV.
In my opinion, top developers have a real passion for coding; enough that they spend a lot of their spare time coding or thinking about coding. These are folks that would code even if they weren't paid for it - they do it because they enjoy coding and solving challenging technical problems. A passionate coder would rather spend his/her free time doing extra coding for their employer, working on their own cool side project or contributing to an open source project than taking an exam.
I'm not sure if the interest in certifications here is because local employers put a high value on them but my experience in the US is that most top tech employers don't. On the contrary I've seen job ads from Google that explicitly ask for engineers who have contributed to open source projects but I've never seen one ask for certification. For entry level software engineers, it is all about the university program attended. If you graduated from MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon with decent marks you can walk into just about any entry level position at any tech company. The people who get certifications in the US are those that don't have a degree at all. I would be surprised to hear that any Carnegie Mellon CS grads are out getting certifications. Rather than having Carnegie Mellon focusing on this certification program why not have them open up a campus in Nairobi like they are doing in Kigali? As a hiring manager, someone with a degree from Carnegie Mellon Nairobi would jump right to the top of the list over the folks with 20 different certifications.
Josh
_______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke ------------ List info, subscribe/unsubscribe http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------
Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke