9 year old boy going for 5th Microsoft Certification

[Fabiano the Spy]

http://digitaljournal.com/article/287122

Jesus... three years old and he's installing Windows?

WTF? I couldn't even read at that age...

[Anthus]

That's pretty crazy. But I guess it is a matter of memorization.

[AtmaWeapon]

I'm sure it's going to turn out that some admin here has certs and I greatly offend them, but I'd take this as more an indication as a gifted child with lots of free time than the next Donald Knuth. I could be wrong. But a few times a year we hear stories of the amazing teenage kid with 2 PhDs, then we never hear about them again. Science fields in particular seem to attract these brilliant burnouts. Usually you'll find that virtuosos displayed talent at an early age, but rarely do you hear about scientists who collect degrees before they are old enough to drink. The scientists who get things done are too busy doing science to fiddle about with premature college. Einstein showed great talent at an early age, but had an otherwise normal education; he was in his 20s when he started making contributions to the scientific community. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft. Steve Jobs was another college dropout. (By the way, I speak mostly in terms of Computer Science because it is a familiar topic for me.)

5 certs requires work, but most of the programming and IT circles I am familiar don't use them as the sole basis for talent. I knew a guy with 2 certs one time, and asked him if I should consider getting them. Here's how he described it to me. You pay a bunch of money for a book and study it really hard. Then you take a test that asks you a few real-world questions, and you answer them exactly by the book. If the certification has a lab, they drop you in a clean room ideal situation and ask you to do some task.

So that's the two problems with the MS certs: by-the-book answers and clean room labs.

What's wrong with by-the-book answers? The real world is dirty and messy. Sometimes what the book tells you to do and what you would really do are two different things. For example, the Mississippi Driver's Handbook states that the appropriate action to take when your car breaks down is to move it to the right shoulder, open your hood, and attach a white cloth to the antenna to signal distress. In the real world, you're going to move your car off the road as safely as possible even if that means to the left shoulder. Then you're going to use your cell phone to call for help, or walk to the next exit. But when you're taking the driver's license exam, you write down that you pull to the right, pop the hood, and put a white cloth on the antenna because that's what the book says and that's how you pass the test. (I had this question, actually.) I'm a developer that believes in agile development methods. So, if you asked me "How would you develop a phone book application?", I'd tell you that I'd start by identifying a few requirements, implementing the simplest thing that worked, then refining the requirements. I'd start with flat files for data storage, and if I needed to I'd swap to a freely available relational database. If the MCSD test asked me the same question, I'd probably answer, "I'd use Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual C#. The database would be Microsoft SQL Server. I'd take advantage of LINQ to SQL in the data layer so as to exploit declarative syntax for data access. The UI layer would use Windows Presentation Foundation to present a rich client experience. I'd use Oslo in the business layer to design a DSL that helps keep working with the business objects accessible to the clients." Notice the difference?

What about clean room labs? Again, the real world is dirty. You aren't going to waltz into ACME and tell them to throw away all of their computers and replace them with Win7 boxes that all have identical hardware. You're going to show up and they're going to tell you you've got $10,000 to make it through the year on a mixture of Win98, Win2k, XP, and Vista boxes. There's going to be old cables. The network equipment will suck. The servers will be suboptimal. Companies don't hire IT because they already have it together. The last time I worked IT, we were able to make comments on purchase orders, but approval was up to the departments. So we had 8 different hardware profiles across our servers and more than a dozen hardware profiles on client machines. We had developers experienced with .NET and MSSQL, but when a department head read some article in Network World about how great Java and Oracle were we got to install an IBM blade rack that ran Oracle. Oh, it also needed a special heavy-duty backup power supply that required facilities to run a dedicated power line; this took a month. It took the expensive external contractors *a year* to get it up and running. In the meantime, four other applications were developed and deployed on the servers we had with .NET and mySQL. Just sayin'.

You can see hints of the brand loyalty that memorizing cert books give you in Marko's Q&A session (http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2010/020510-marko.html#top):


For your personal preference, Windows or Mac OS?

For everyone, the choice is different, so for me I use Windows because I am satisfied with its security, stability, scalability, productivity and many other good advantages of the Microsoft Windows operating system. [...]

What's your take on open source software?

Well, I still have not used any open source software, because I want to implement only the platform that I know the best and which is tested by me.

This kid is solid gold when he applies for a Marketing position. As an IT guy? Not so much. If all he trusts in the world is MS software there's going to be a lot of closed doors. This is a kid that we're supposed to be holding as a virtuoso in the field and he doesn't trust Google Chrome or Firefox because they aren't well-tested like IE. I know some web developers that would have to leave the room so poor Marko wouldn't hear the laughter.

So the kid is talented and can regurgitate facts. Let's see if he/she* uses the next 11 years to do something important, or if he gets to live with the knowledge that his 15 minutes of fame came and went before he even hit puberty. Am I bitter? Nah. I saw this article earlier and except for the detailed stuff about certs I've already had this discussion.

*(I'm really confused. Marko seems like a masculine name to me, and the article clearly says it's a boy. The pictures are suspicious. (http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2010/020510-marko.html#slide8))

[Fabiano the Spy]

I understand what you're saying, Atma, and I agree. But at the same time, this kid has been around for a couple years.

I think he's already accomplished a lot, let's just see him apply his knowledge.

With his knowledge and established fame, he could make a fuck ton of money at his age.

Also, he does certainly look like a girl. I even had to double check myself. Certainly weird.

Edit: Also, Marko is a boy's name in Spanish.

[AtmaWeapon]

I guess the problem is usually you judge a sysadmin's talent by how many extinct species exist in the fossil record of his beard (no idea how you make this judgement for women!) This kid has no beard, thus it's hard to judge his wisdom!

[Nicholas Steel]

http://armageddongames.net/showthread.php?44994-9-year-old-boy-going-for-5th-Microsoft-Certification&p=431808&viewfull=1#post431808
Your post ends abruptly at "I saw this article earlier and except for..."


http://digitaljournal.com/article/287122

Jesus... three years old and he's installing Windows?

WTF? I couldn't even read at that age...
Probably will grow up with absolutely no social life what so ever. Maybe becomes a hippie due to extra long luxurious hair ._.

[AtmaWeapon]

http://armageddongames.net/showthread.php?44994-9-year-old-boy-going-for-5th-Microsoft-Certification&p=431808&viewfull=1#post431808
Your post ends abruptly at "I saw this article earlier and except for..."


Probably will grow up with absolutely no social life what so ever. Maybe becomes a hippie due to extra long luxurious hair ._.

Ooops! I was in the middle of that sentence and decided to edit something, then I guess I never came back.

I kind of agree with you, but don't know all of the details. I was mostly a shut-in in my youth, and grew up with social adjustment issues that I still deal with. It's healthy to make your kid interact with other children at an early age, even if it's just to have friends over for video games. If this kid is doing nothing but working on these certs then there's a huge potential for burnout resulting in a maladjusted individual. To some extent, social issues aren't a hurdle for good sysadmins, but it sure helps in the interview.

I left out one last thing about certs: they aren't worthless but require extra effort. If I had three programming applicants before me: no certification, certification only, and certification + "ask for demos of my work", I'd be really interested in the person with demos. The no certification person better be a recent grad or have some decent experience in his history. The certification only person is going to get drilled really hard with dirty real-world questions where the book answer is dead wrong; if she has a good answer I can assume she has at least *some* practical experience. I'd expect IT to be similar: what matters is experience and someone who can demonstrate their skill is better than someone with qualifications for the skill.

Think of it this way: if you read 10 or 15 books about cooking, do you think that makes you a chef? What about if you prepare meals and serve them frequently to others, who give high complements? The books can improve your skill, but without demonstration there is nothing.

I wouldn't bet on him making a mint in IT either. I served 2 years as an IT/Developer hybrid, and the IT part was the worst. Developers got paid more and worked less hours; IT was on call 24/7. In IT, you don't exist unless there is a problem. The network could work 364.9 days out of the year, and for that last tenth of a day your name is on everyone's tongue as "that bastard that can't keep the network up". You read that thread in GB about how much working retail sucks? I seem to remember lots of IT in there. A manager's project is always so important that you better drop whatever you were doing to take care of it. Don't you dare tell him that there's no room in the budget for a new server for his department, it takes 5 minutes for his morning report to generate and he just *KNOWS* if you add another server it'll get faster. You'd also better buy some new drives too, he tried ripping some DVDs last night and the network share was full. Also, yesterday a friend sent him an application that was supposed to work his stock portfolio for him but the stupid virus scanner wouldn't let it run, so he uninstalled the virus scanner. Now the machine has a lot of popups, can you fix that? Also his laptop at home is working kind of strange, you can fix that too right? And his secretary is having trouble with OH GOD PLEASE DON'T SHOOT! It's kind of sad that IT doesn't make a lot more than it does, because in my eyes it's as much an engineering field as development. You design networks that work. The constraints are budget, effort, time, psychology, and stupidity. It's not much different than software engineering, though in my field when psychology or stupidity is a constraint it tells you to put your resume back on the market. In IT it's the norm.

I kind of feel sorry for the kid; he picked the wrong certs.