The problem with certifications

There was a question on ILUGC today to which I responded. I am reposting it as a blog entry.

You should first understand how certifications work from the perspective of a vendor who offers such certification say Microsoft, Redhat or SAP. The vendor has an economic interest in selling his product to a company. The company which buys a product (or a service in case the of Redhat) wants to know if the product/service they buy can be used by people they are going to employ. This is where the brilliance of marketing sets in.

They con the students and the candidates in the job market that there are several jobs awaiting them if only they clear the certification in their technology. They then go and talk to all the colleges and institutes like NIIT and convince them to market the certification and give them the necessary materials to make it a course. They then contact book authors who fill in pages and pages with mind numbing facts about the technology. The institute in the meanwhile has started tailoring a course and claims that it can get you from a dud to a certified professional in 3 months. As with any statistical distribution in a country with a billion people, a sizable few take up the certifications. The first few batches are always tough. Only the good guys clear the first 3 or 4 batches. But good guys like to share knowledge. So they share the dumps with the world.

The vendor does nothing to oppose this as they need that pool of skills in the market. After they have got enough number of people with the piece of paper with the name of the vendor and a printed signature of the CEO/founder of the company, the marketing department gets busy making powerpoint slides. The slides have graph of stating the number of people who have finished the certification and how easy it would be for their customers to find the right skills. And since the numbers (supply) are aplenty and the licensed customers are a few (demand), by the laws of economics, they should have no problem in finding people with the right skills (and a cheap pay).

The mindless HR then goes and "recruits" people with certifications. So if you notice, if you are a good candidate, you can lower your value just by getting certified. There are alternative means to improve your employability. You can start contributing to open source for a start. Do not pick difficult projects. If you cannot find a project, try building something. Try creating a simple webapp or a game. I am seeing too many freshers with "Biometric AI-Driven Neural Network Enabled Grid Based Path Finding World Domination Engine" on their resumes. And they want me to believe that they did it in 3 months without being able to write fizz buzz in their favorite language.

As an employer myself, I would recommend you to do the following. Take up a small project. A small pong game or a simple webapp that solves your problem and document all your learnings in a blog. This will make you a better writer and a better programmer. Use open source technologies. Apart from being the best choice in terms of freedoms that you get, you also get to interact directly with better programmers in mailing lists like these.

To pioneer a change, I, on behalf of Artha42, am ready mentor a select group of students every year. Your work will be entirely open sourced. I promise that you will not write a single line of proprietary code. That said, we are not Google. We are a small startup with limited resources. We cannot hold something as large as the Google Summer of Code. But we can do something smaller. If you are interested in such an internship opportunity, do drop in a line to careers artha42 com with "internship" in the subject line or visit our careers page.

Is piracy good for Microsoft?

I was watching this video on Cranky Geeks and they were talking about Romania and piracy. The story is covered here.

"Software piracy has many negative economic consequences, such as local software industries being crippled by competition with pirated software from abroad, and lost tax revenues and jobs from the lack of a legitimate market," said the BSA report.

"These costs reverberate up and down the supply and distribution chains."

I was not surprised. I find this it was extremely immature and stupid on the part of the government. I am from India and I can relate to this. The government and people here are equally immature and stupid. I believe that we are painting ourselves into a corner. What appalls me is the ease in which we can get pirated software vis-a-vis their open source counterparts. We can get pirated software from friends, or a walk on SP Road or any of the PC assemblers. But to get the latest versions of open source software and its documentation in terms of books is an extremely costly affair. If you don't believe me visit Gangarams or Sapna Book house and look at the price of linux distros there. I do not believe that technical superiority is responsible for the liberal presence of Windows operating system in Indian homes. It is due to its easy availability of pirated software. System assemblers know Windows better than Linux. The people who get it buy computers for browsing, surfing, watching movies and playing games. And not to mention the uncles and aunties fiddling with worthless astrology software that runs only on DOS (yes! you heard me. DOS!!!) and Windows. Probably we must make such astrology software for Linux and make it available on Live CDs for all these maamas and maamis to try it out.

I have some friends who are Indians living in India and yet buy Windows XP Home licenses. Can you believe that? They definitely are the minority. They are statistically insignificant. And some of them do have a Ubuntu installation safely tucked into one of their partitions. They were actually sold on the fact that Microsoft can actually track you down and sue you for using pirated versions of their software. But when that does happen, then the whole country has to be worried. IRCTC's website does not work well with Firefox. I book my tickets most of the time with IRCTC. Indian airlines' website does not work well with firefox. ICICI's website has just started working with Firefox. We are actually glued on to windows. I cannot find a single indian music site which works on flash audio like www.odeo.com or www.pandora.com. My favorite is www.musicindiaonline.com, which hosts an ActiveX control. I am not against Microsoft but I believe that it is not an economically viable alternative for us as a nation. I strongly believe that India is better off with open source software. Wine is not the solution. It will only worsen the situation. What we need is cross platform applications.

Microsoft will not bother about piracy in India as it is generating a huge talent pool and establishing a base of future customers. These customers are already trained on Microsoft software. So the organizations that hire them run Windows. Even the Java schools have a starter program for the computer illiterates and they start of with Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Why don't they start of with Ubuntu or Linspire? Why dont they teach them the Google life. I am not against Microsoft or Windows. I am against the fact that we think it is smart on our part to pirate software and use it while all we are doing is increasing the liability on our employers and India Inc., as a whole. Open source software can solve most of these problems. With increased broadband penetration and web increasingly becoming a platform, we must get away from IE and ActiveX as far as possible have cross platform technology solutions.

Both Windows and Linux have their advantages and disadvantages depending on the kind of applications that you try to run. I feel Linux is better for me. It has been over 2 years since I switched to Linux as my primary operating system and I have never looked back. I wish others could see this in the same light as I do.

Moving back to blogger

I have moved back to blogger from my previous blog on geekswithblogs.net. I know that frequently changing the URL of a blog will hurt the traffic. But I have no other choice. Geeks with blogs admin application does not support unicode content and that really sucks. Apart from that fact, I have been working on phonetic layouts for both हिन्दी and தமிழ் on Ubuntu. I have just completed them . The first version can be downloaded here.

Most people like me are living the g-life. I use almost all the services that google exposes. Search, Calendar, Blogger, CodeHosting, Adsense, Docs and Spreadsheets, Picasa web, Youtube (although not technically a google service yet) and maps to name a few. Google has long since become the synonym for the word search. It is now pioneering in the applications space. Google Apps for your domain will give products like M$ Exchange and Lotus Domino a run for their money. It makes perfect business sense for SMEs to base their groupware on Google's infrastructure than maintain their own. This is of course given that you must have the kind of bandwidth and the infrastructure to remain connected and ensure that the business is not affected. But I do not see this as a huge problem. GMail exposes your inbox via POP3 and hence it is possible to have your mails both offline and online. Google Calendar can be used to sync up appointments. What is missing from Google right now is a Wiki. That would make it a complete groupware solution. Google would probably integrate its docs and spreadsheets application when they are mature with your domain. Google is taking web to the next level. And it is way more than Web 2.0. But let us refrain from naming it Web 3.0. Just imagine if we have enough bandwidth and google lets us host our databases on its infrastructure. I am sure google would like it. :-)

We are now using the Web as its creator Tim Berners Lee envisioned it to be. A readable and a writable medium. Web is no more a place for companies to advertise their business. It is now a formidable platform on which they conduct business.

Its midnight and I am very tired. Its about time I hit the sack. Good night world.