Oracle Java Certification

[Heuristix]

I was wondering if anyone is able to shed some insight on the pros of becoming certified in Java through Oracle's official system.

I have seen around the Interwebz that most employers see a certification on an application and throw it out. Multiple people have said that certifications mean nothing on an application and can be detrimental in some cases. I find these sentiments a bit strange if they are in fact true. Clearly every certified Java associate/programmer/developer is not going to be as skillful with writing code as the certification would indicate, but that in no way means that people who are skilled at writing clean, object oriented code do not have certifications. Perhaps people who are skilled enough never seek certification as their skills speak louder than any certification would?

Anyway, I'm only a high school student. I'd love to be able to work as an intern or employee for a tech company over the summer. Would becoming certified increase my chances (only being in high school?)? Would my time be better spent working on some sort of project that displays my skills?

Any insight is very much appreciated.

(Also, if this is the wrong forum, sorry in advance. It seemed most appropriate).

[Jplus]

It depends on where you want to work. Perhaps at Oracle it might help. Otherwise, I don't think it will make any significant difference. If you want to work for a tech company over the summer as a high school student, I think the only thing that counts is that they'll believe you can actually write a program.

Coincidentally, there was a good post about this on the forums recently: Don't call yourself a programmer.

[OmenPigeon]

In all the hiring I've been involved in¹, it'd be much more helpful to show something that you've built, in whatever language, than to show a certification. A github account featuring actual working code is better in two ways. First, it's much closer to what someone actually wants to hire you to do. No one pays interns to pass tests for a summer, but (at least where I work) we do pay them to ship code. Second, if you're being interviewed by programmers (and if you aren't, that's a strong signal that you probably don't want that internship), real live code is a much better jumping off point for an interview. There aren't really any followup questions to "Oh, so you have an Oracle Java cert? Yep." (Except maybe "How was it? Long and boring.", which is not an awesome conversation.) But a good interviewer will have any number of things to ask about code you've written. Being able to hold a deep conversation about code that you've written yourself is tragically rare among interviewees, even though it's a really significant fraction of the job they're interviewing for.

1: Admittedly, this sample is neither particularly broad nor deep, but there it is

[Webzter]

Having been in IT for a while now (almost 20 years) and having done a fair share of hiring, I have a bias against certification by vendors for their own products (Microsoft certs, Oracle certs, etc).

To second OmenPigeon, I'm much more interested in interviews where someone can talk code... maybe pull up a website they've built, have a github or bitbucket account I can check out before the interview, talk about open source projects they've contributed to, or generally show me they're excited about problem solving. If my boss has me interviewing people, it's because we need help. A certificate doesn't show me that you can help me.

[Felstaff]

Hi I'm Certified from CISCO, Microsoft and ADOBE. who knows what is worth of certification will surely take you seriously how ever if you want any information or study material related to certification do visit this site it helped me a lot.

www.poop2poop.biz/iveremovedyourwebaddress

[Breakfast]

I'm going to echo the sentiments of everyone else for the most part.

Certificates are a good thing because it shows that some organization (Oracle, Microsoft...) recognizes that you of an acceptable level with a certain technology. Certificates are a bad thing because they're only relevant while the technology is. For example, Microsoft's .NET certificates are only good for the current framework version and the version directly preceding the current one. Once they release new technologies or update existing ones enough you have to take a new test or take a test to renew your certificate. If you're not willing to keep up with something like that a certificate isn't really worth it.

However, experience and projects to show off that experience are far more important. Since you're still in highschool, you're time would probably be better placed learning design patterns, how to structure larger projects, and finding a college. Go for the internship though. It could be a great experience.