97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 94. Why I Don’t Hold Any Value in Certifications

Colin Vipurs

Some time back—it must have been around the mid-noughties—one of my friends had taken and passed the Java Certified Programmer exam with an impressive score of 98%. Eager to keep up, I took one of the practice tests during a lunch break and, although I didn’t score as high, I got a passing grade. One question on the exam has always stuck in my mind. It was to do with the inheritance hierarchy in Swing applications, something I had no problem answering as my day job was working with Swing, but it did strike me as odd to ask something that could easily be looked up in your IDE. I never did get around to taking the exam, mostly due to being partway through studying for my master’s degree at the time.

Fast-forward a few years, and I had just started a new job. During the first week, I was asked by one of my new colleagues if I was Java 5 certified. “No,” I replied, “but I have been using it for the last year.” Turns out he was certified, so good news for me that someone on my team would have a base level of knowledge and skill. It was less than two weeks later that he asked why we have to bother overriding hashCode when we override equals. He genuinely didn’t understand the relationship between the two methods. This was just the tip of what he didn’t know, yet he was certified!

Fast-forward another few years, and ...