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Celebrating 10 years of Java and our technological productivity

A look back on the last 10 years of the network age

By Max Goff, JavaWorld.com, 05/23/05

Page 3 of 7

Candle Six: Certification soup and outsourcing

Sun was certainly not the first company to offer professional certifications for technical skills. Microsoft's MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) program probably predates Java by at least two years. And to my reckoning, Novell was offering certification programs for their proprietary systems well before its entree into the Unix space in the early '90s. So there is nothing new with Java certifications, per se. But the explosion of technology certifications that has occurred since the ascension of Java has been warmed, no doubt, by the "virtual team" collaborative possibilities inherent with a burgeoning Internet. That potential, coupled with the compelling financial draw of world-class programming talent in a globally-distributed work environment, proved to be a potent recipe for a massive shift in knowledge-work practices, otherwise known as outsourcing. Arguably, programming certification was fuel to the outsourcing fire, both of which burn brightly atop this anniversary candle.

By my count, there are now seven different Java certifications, distributed among programmer, developer, and architect classifications. Each of these, presumably, helps to prepare one to successfully navigate a Java career path. Now if you really want to get seriously certified, Microsoft offers at least three times that many, from your basic MCSE to a litany of platform-specific specialties such as security guru, database administrator, cluster server professional, and many more.

Add to that a bevy of Cisco certifications, those from Novell, which now includes a suite of Linux certifications, those from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, Computer Associates, Apple, and a herd of others, and one begins to wonder if perhaps a new discipline might emerge from the Certification Soup that has been simmering since the advent of the network age: a Certification Specialist, someone who is certification certified. Someone who has studied the entire universe of technology certifications and can advise companies on which certifications they should be requiring for the various job descriptions that permeate the enterprise. Alas, though I write this suggestion in jest, it may yet be that such a discipline may very well emerge to cope with the explosion of certifications that began in earnest some 10 years ago. That trend, sadly, does not seem to be abating.

Candle Five: Community source

Open source software, as a movement, traces its roots to the formation of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and GNU ("GNU" is a recursive acronym that means "Gnu's not Unix") by Richard Stallman in 1983. Bill Joy would probably argue that the concept of community source actually predates Stallman's vision, beginning with the Berkeley (BSD, or Berkeley Software Distribution) Unix offering, which Joy developed as a graduate student in the mid-1970s. While the GNU project did not actually give rise to a free version of Unix, it did result in the creation of some reasonably popular tools for Unix programmers, like the GNU C compiler and a text editor. More importantly, GNU set the stage for the more ambitious, more successful free software development projects in the 1990s, including Linux and Apache and (to some extent) Java.

 

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