Re: Certification choices

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> For example, in requirements-analysis, no programming skills are
> necessary (and may be preferred that way).  Developing use-cases need no
> formal programming background. In fact, some argue "technology" should
> not even be a consideration at this point.  Let the requirements drive
> the direction for the technology to be applied.

However, there tends to be more reputation and money to be made with a 
5-person "team" developing an EJB container with persistence frameworks 
and XML-based Web Services and lots of pretty UML diagrams than with a 20 
line Perl script you can put into production tomorrow.

So, the size of projected budget, helpfully provided by the same "analysts",
tends to drive the "solution", which conveniently dovetails with the rest
of their firm's experience base.

I'm just as much a fan of "mission critical" as the next Information Architect,
but the dirty little secret is that not every project qualifies as such,
and you wind up with a lot of over-engineered white elephants and lots of middle
managers too scared to fess up when implementing anti-patterns. Then there's the
age-old tactic of lopping off requirements to meet lower budget targets, or
worse, not telling analysts of additional requirements that are known to drive
the budget through the roof, with the hope that the project will complete and
that you'll get something for nothing. We all know how that story ends.

On the other hand, you have folks thinking that some freshly minted MCSEs can
re-implement your entire business processes and IT infrastructure with a couple
of .NET licenses in three weeks, and are left holding a bag of some stinky 
stuff when it isn't reliably, doesn't integrate with anything else, nobody 
knows how to keep it running, and some 12 year old in the Phillipines hacked 
it just before your quarter-end is due. But the Powerpoint was sooooo
compelling, and the clickey-clickey wizards made it seem soooo easy...

I guess the point is that hard stuff is, well, hard. And the people who know 
how to do hard stuff well will never be a commodity. Anyone telling
a different story is selling snake oil.

Mike808/

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http://www.valuenet.net



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