I’ve just hung up my badge from the latest tech event I attended.
It’s always a pleasure to stay updated and network with old and new friends, former students and teachers, people you see every 3 months, the same frequency with which I go to the gym. But there’s never the effect of searching for lost time; staying on top of things means never having to say “Remember, we used to do it this way.”
Nostalgia hits me instead every time I pass by the Sheraton, which, before Microsoft opened its Rome office, was the theater for all the presentations that software houses organized as if there was no tomorrow.
I remember that I was almost always there for a short but intense period, so much so that I had started calling the doorman by name and using informal language with everyone; “La Dolce Vita” had moved under the Magliana viaduct. There were vibrant presentations but, with the Internet still on dial-up, the only way for companies to provide demos were heavy boxes, brochures, and DVDs.
At the time, I had a Honda Sky 50cc already worn from always carrying me around. With the additional load of all the material I was hoarding, my travel times on Columbus avenue perhaps to pay homage to the great navigator, were greatly influenced by the winds that blew inflating my windshield: having them against me meant spending the evening there.
But I was young and enthusiastic, there was only one creed and I wanted to be part of it, I chose to take the vows, which at the time meant getting certified.
The company I worked for was forward-thinking and thought about the future a bit like a blind canary in a coal mine.
More to please me and shut me up, since I was constantly nagging about the need to get certified, they finally decided to pay for a course for me.
The CEO at the time, a tennis player feared in all the clubs of northern Rome, did a long market research, I think by talking about it in said clubs, and finally enrolled me in a course with a final exam on Windows NT: they were giving it at a bargain price because it would soon be replaced by Windows 2000.
But don’t look a gift horse in the mouth: I took the course, passed the exam, and even completed it for a couple of colleagues who were having difficulties not so much with NT as with English, one had gone completely crazy because he was desperately trying to translate Contoso into a random noun…
The MCSE for WinNT Server 4.0, cardboard, I believe with two CDs, I remember it as indestructible as the Nokia 3310, its contemporary. I was so proud of the diploma printed on Seattle paper that I think I talked about nothing else for a couple of weeks, even in contexts completely unrelated to IT. It was in a pizzeria that I was offered to become an instructor myself. For two years, I did nothing but get certified and certify people non-stop, from system administrators to DBAs to developers.
Paid excessively, DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the wrong example, think rather of “The Great Gatsby”. We had a huge office on Via del Tritone and I remember very well that many colleagues would take some female students to eat at the Trevi Fountain, explaining to them that they were in negotiations to buy it.
Then the vein dried up, I ended up like DiCaprio in “The Revenant”, I ran away barely surviving and getting many scars, while others stayed, deluding themselves that the golden times would return, and got lobotomized like in “Shutter Island”.
The DiCaprio Magic Quadrant can be applied to many realities, those who work as devs usually experience all four situations in a single day. Fortunately, I had maintained my consulting activity and my business cards with the Microsoft logo prominently displayed guaranteed me respect and authority at least in the mainstream.
The web had become popular and the heavy books on how to use Windows APIs with Visual Basic were now only good as monitor stands. These were years when you could look for work as an HTML programmer without people bursting into laughter in your face.
The company I was lending my lance to at that time had miraculously started working with the PA, a small contract that had escaped the usual suspects precisely because they required free code and because our CEO absolutely didn’t know the difference between PHP and ASP. But probably our clients didn’t know either, the first meeting went on for hours talking about tennis while I squirmed in a chair waiting for the moment to at least understand the title of the project.
Having shed my Stormtrooper uniform, I discovered with disappointment that certifications in the Zend, MySQL, and company houses were few, semi-hidden but, above all, by getting certified you risked becoming the laughingstock of the community, they would look at you like someone in a suit and tie who spends money on aperitifs rather than buying a new RAM bank, few would continue to greet me and those few would whisper behind my back “Do or do not! There is no certification!”
For years I therefore lost interest, occasionally looking nostalgically at specialized technical books and wondering if at Contoso they had finally stopped making a mess.
Then the cloud arrived. Cloud certifications are the most beautiful thing a programmer could wish for, boasting the title of ‘cloud archi star’ attributing to oneself the realization of the definitive lambda is as close as it gets to passing under the arch of triumph, crowned with laurel and with barbarians in chains.
Here we can admire the Microsoft certifications on Azure, but while I’m writing they’ve probably added more
But was it true glory?
The personal answer is yes.
A normal dev studies all his life, but the learning process is certainly very personal and always full of shortcuts. When I see books with the subtitle “The Good Parts” I always think I’m missing something precious right from the start. Not to mention the biases that each one carries: the anti-ORM, those who work only on-premise, the deniers of automated tests, etc.
Preparing for certification instead forces us to read everything, giving us moments of wonder and showing us aspects that we would hardly grasp in everyday life.
The Wizard of Oz gives a diploma to the Scarecrow, who realizes he has a brain… And then it gives us the correct version, which we can always choose not to use, but at least we know it exists. One more certification won’t bring world peace but it certainly puts your knowledge to the test and gives you a good stress test.
This is as far as your dev conscience is concerned, on the company side the advantage is double.
The companies you work for are always in doubt about whether you are geniuses or eminent slackers, as if one thing excluded the other. It’s difficult to make them understand how good you are at your job, and trying to explain it to them is demeaning and frustrating. I often see devs on the sidelines, employed as ball boys, turning blue while the CEO yells scornfully between court changes: “… my son made his first Excel macro at school, how much did you say we pay you?”
But if you’re certified, they understand that.
And even when you interview with new companies, your interlocutors, technicians eager to prove how much cooler they are than you, become like Count Dracula in front of a crucifix.
“Yeah, okay, he’s certified, if I set my mind to it, you know how many I could get?”
And it has no contraindications, I’ve never met people who became less performant after getting certified: many work better, some ask for a raise, few change jobs because a company that supports you in a certification path is a healthy company that knows that the best investment it can make is to grow its employees.
I was talking about it at a CEO tennis tournament where I was invited to serve at the bar: there were many matches skewed by the fact that some, boasting about their certified programmers, unnerve opponents so much that it has been reported as unsportsmanlike conduct and it seems that in some clubs it has been banned.
Did you think CEOs had you certified for some suggestion from HR who would like to improve retention policies? Deluded, they’re only interested in winning at Tennis…
