Real Python - I'm certified

Hey there,

One of the "shameful secrets" of my career is that I'm a certified "Scrum Product Owner."

Let me tell you how this came to be:

One fine Tuesday morning my manager John approached me.

"Hey Dan, we've booked this Agile training in town and one of the PMs can't make it. Want to go?"

I'd just sat down with a steaming cup of coffee about to sift through my inbox, but…I just can't say "no" to free education.

So I went.

Now, I'm a software developer and I like to believe I'm a thoughtful and rational human being…

Naturally that puts me at odds with some of the stuff that the "Church of Agile" has brought upon us.

(And guess what, going to that agile training seminar didn't change my opinion one bit.)

This "training" wasn't about the principles and ideas outlined in the original agile manifesto.

This was "capital-A" Agile, chewed up beyond recognition and then regurgitated for pointy haired managers who had never even WRITTEN a line of code.

I wouldn't have wanted to work with any of the corporate drones receiving agile training at that seminar, or to inflict them on my team.

I mean, most of the "product managers" there spent the whole day either staring blankly at the wall or playing with their phones.

I'm not even sure if the guy who ran the seminar had ever shipped a software product successfully….

At the end of the event, everyone who had dragged their body to more than 50% of the sessions became a "Scrum Certified Product Owner." (!!!)

They even promised to send us a "high-quality print certificate" we could frame and hang on the wall…

Needless to say I was NOT impressed.

Now, I'm getting carried away ranting about commercially-perverted flavors of agile here, so let me reel this back in:

Getting certified in a programming language or anything else that has to do with programming means doodley-squat.

It's useless.

In my experience most of these certificates are a complete joke.

No one hiring for a (good) developer job takes these certifications seriously. Especially not if one can get them by spending a day or two staring at a wall.

Certificates are a poor substitute for examples. Employers would much rather see work you've done—than a piece of paper that says you have the ability to do work.

Don't get me wrong, I like the general idea of certification—

Having a third-party to point to that can, in effect, say "Hey, this guy/gal has at least a baseline level of knowledge and here's proof for it."

But as of 2020, this simply doesn't exist.

(And that's why interviewing software developers is still more of an art than a science.)

Please DO learn as much as you can but DON'T invest extra time and/or money to get a sham certificate. It's a waste.

Alright, time to brew some green tea to calm my nerves…In the mean time:

Happy Pythoning!

— Dan Bader

P.S. Note that "certificate" != "CS degree." I'll talk more about that distinction in the future.