SCJP

Does it determine someone's skill in Java programming? A few days ago a candidate came and I also joined the interview. To be honest, I was surprised when I first looked at his CV. Apparently he passed the SCJP 1.6 which I "was" always wanted to pursue some day, with a beautiful score: 90%. He also has a high International TOEFL score. I'm pretty sure that this person is very smart and works hard, actually that means a lot. But if we look from the other side, he has never worked as a programmer before and he went to college majored in Mathematics, not computer science or even Electrical engineering.

At first pardon me for my prejudicial before continue reading, but I do believe that somehow people who has taken basic IT courses, or self-educate themselves start from the basic will excel those people who have not. Without those basic knowledges, someone doesn't really understand what is what. Yeah, even most of the people who is already a programmer is just playing around and doesn't know what is what.

And experience? By doing mistakes, we learn from it. To be a programmer, someone has to make some mistakes. I did too, lots of it. But at that time I was only working on office's internal software, not any project which will be deployed to production.

At the end of the day, we decided to not hire him. Actually it's not because of his flying scores in TOEFL and SCJP. It's because he asked for a salary that should be given to an engineer with 3 years experience, while IMHO himself is still a fresh graduate.

I don't know why people care so much about scores. If you are experienced enough to identify smart persons, you don't have to look at their scores to know their ability. CV is just written words, anybody can lie about it.

A building should have a strong enough foundation to make it a good one.