Ubuntu Certified Professionals

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 05 April 2006 17:59, Kevin Cole wrote:
> Paul Flint wrote:
> > On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Jane Silber wrote:

I'd like to put Paul's mind at rest on this point if possible. An 
Ubuntu certification has tremendous potential for Ubuntu as a whole 
and I feel it's important that the whole community is informed about 
what it's for and how it was done.

This will be a longish post as I have tons of info to share, so feel 
free to move along if certification doesn't interest you.

I can't comment much on the business aspects of having a cert program 
- that's not my field, there are Canonical employees who can answer 
to that. I'm a hard-core techie, I *can* comment on the 
technicalities and I can talk geek-speak to this list. I'm qualified 
to speak on this as I was on the team developing the exam. I got 10 
techies together in Cape Town, South Africa and we thrashed out a 
large number of the exam questions. 25% of the exam is questions I 
worked out myself, and the remainder come from various persons in 
North America.

I'm not blowing my own trumpet, just saying for the record that I can 
assure you the exam questions are not the dumb half-assed type 
questions you find on certain other non-Linux OS exams.

Comments in-line:

> >> Today the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and Canonical Ltd.
> >> jointly announced the development of a certification exam for
> >> the Ubuntu distribution. This certification exam will enable
> >> qualified candidates to demonstrate specific expertise in the
> >> professional use of Ubuntu <http://www.ubuntu.com>. The
> >> certification exam will be launched in Johannesburg, South
> >> Africa, May 16 - 19, 2006.
> >>
> >> The Ubuntu certification will consist of a single exam on top of
> >> LPI's existing 101 and 102 exams. This will give candidates the
> >> advantage of an existing global standard, LPIC-1, plus the
> >> "Ubuntu Certified Professional" status. The exam is being
> >> developed by LPI's product development team and Ubuntu community
> >> members from around the globe. The exam is expected to be
> >> completed in early May with the first paper exams being
> >> available in mid-May to qualified LPIC-1 candidates who are
> >> attending LinuxWorld Johannesburg. The computer-based testing
> >> version will be made available later in June through Thomson
> >> Prometric and Pearson VUE testing centres around the world.
> >> Initial exam price has been set at $100 US.
> >>
> >> For more information, see http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntucert
> >
> > Dear Jane,
> >
> > Greetings from Linuxworld Boston.
> >
> > I sincerely disagree with this approach to certification.
> >
> > I believe that the only proper way to gain stature in the Ubuntu
> > community is through participation in the process, the community,
> > and finally by contribution of Code.  This form of commercial
> > certification, at best merely exacerbates an economic incentive
> > for good test takers with rote knowledge, and at worst
> > disadvantages those who code without economic ability.  Jane this
> > discriminates against those not fortunate enough to have $100.00,
> > a good portion of the Third World!

Paul, LPI has always been very clear in their statements about where 
their cert fits in the linux spectrum. It's an indicator of 
competence and nothing more, just one factor to look at when 
evaluating a person. The cert isn't intended to impress you or any 
other coder, it's intended to impress your boss and give him a 
reliable metric. It's also a sysadmin cert, not a coding cert.

Amongst us techies, the code will always speak louder than a cert. But 
not all sysadmins can code, that's not what they are there for.

> > I have seen the disastrous work and depreciation of "Certified
> > Professionals" in data processing in my lifetime, beginning with
> > Novel Certified Network Engineers (CNEs), Microsoft System
> > Certified Engineers (MSCEs), through the current debacle with
> > Certified Information System Security Professionals (CISSPs). 
> > Please do not depreciate what good coders worldwide have written
> > with this "administrivia".

I hear you, I dislike those programs as much as you. If you haven't 
already done so, go visit www.lpi.org and read the background info 
posted there. That's not PR spin - it really is the deal at LPI. The 
problem with the major certs is that they are income sources for the 
vendor. Course fees, manuals fees, exam fees all add up to a nice sum 
of money, so it's in their interest to organize the program to 
maximize number of bums on seats.

LPI takes a different approach they ONLY do certification. The entire 
exam development is done by the community, by guys like me and you. 
What happens in practice in that we write the kind of meaningful exam 
questions we'd like to see on exams we write ourselves. No trick 
questions, no smart-alec wording of questions trying to be funny, 
just good solid questions that measure something real. Most questions 
come from the writer's own experience, something he ran into and 
feels it's valuable to know the answer to. It's a good system.

> > I would plead to the Community Council to immediately intervene
> > in this very important matter of Professional Certification and
> > beg its council and insight on this crucial matter.  I assure you
> > that the humans that built "Linux for Human Beings" are worth
> > more to this world than a damn $100.00 test.  I respectfully, as
> > an outsider place myself at their disposal and agenda towards
> > this discussion.

As a fellow geek, would you trust me if I said the exam isn't what you 
fear it might be?

> > I call upon the *buntu community (and its surrounding universe)
> > to understand its own diverse nature and look towards a
> > certification process that enhances what we are all about...
> > hacking the Code.

It's not a coder's exam, it's a sysadmin exam. Coders have their own 
special throne set aside just for them. You still get to earn your 
membership on it though.

> Hi all.  Since I was explicitly CC'd in several of these messages,
> I thought I'd weigh in, and hope I'm not displaying my ignorance
> too much. But not wanting to bother everyone I've trimmed the CC's
> a bit, and hope that if anything I say really resonates, it will
> make its way to the appropriate eyeballs. (That and I'm not
> subscribed to all those mailing lists in the initial CC's.)
>
> I find myself, as oft I do, somewhere between Mr. Elkner and Mr.
> Flint. (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?) ;-)
>
> I would ask "What makes Ubuntu different from other distro's?"  The
> answer to that question should determine what makes Ubuntu
> Certification different from other Linux certifications.  I'm not
> talking about the niggling technical differences (e.g. "use sudo
> instead of su").  I'm thinking more about "philosophical"
> differences, if you will.

Kevin, we all know what makes Ubuntu different - it's the polish, the 
community spirit, the thrill when it JustWorks(tm), the sinking 
feeling you get when last night's bleeding edge commit breaks your 
carefully crafted libs, the feeling of triumph and the "Gotcha!" when 
you find the bug at 3am and submit your own patch. And much much 
more.

But that's not what Mr Big Exec, CTO of GotBucks, Inc is looking for 
if he's considering moving to Ubuntu. He wants guaranteed support, 
and assurance that the distro will be around for a long time. And he 
especially wants this:

SELECT * FROM job_applicants WHERE clue > 0;
	x rows returned
	
	(where x > 0)
	a good cert gives him that

As to what's on the exam about Ubuntu's differences, there's a page on 
the wiki describing the exam Objectives. Unfortunately, philosophical 
differences are intangible and can't be tested. There is a section on 
what the community is all about and how it works.

> Red Hat already has an EXCELLENT (ball-buster) certification exam. 
> (I barely squeaked through for 6.2, and then blew it on RHEL3.) As
> for LPI, I've only taken the first of their series, and it was
> "okay, I guess" but I didn't feel accomplished after passing it. 
> Something about the multiple-choice nature of it, I suspect. Dunno
> about their higher levels.

RH offers a good exam, and people who pass it are justifiably proud of 
it. I have some inside contacts into how they do it, and I'm assured 
the process is rigorous and quality is the only thing. The PR 
department seems to make some claims about the exam that they can't 
back up, and they are especially fond of bashing other programs, but 
that doesn't detract from the work the technical folks put together.

LPI exams are psychometrically (the science of testing) and 
statistically valid. it just so happens that if you know the subject 
matter of the first exam *well*, you will breeze through it with both 
eyes closed. But that's the whole point of it. If you know it, you 
know it and deserve a superb result.

I need to dispell this myth that somehow multiple choice questions are 
inherently poor quality and that practical exams must be better. This 
meme needs to be debunked, and it's about as valid as saying that 
FLOSS must be poor quality precisely because it's free. Perhaps 
people got exposed to terrible multiple choice exams at school, or 
maybe they wrote a <shudder> MCSE </shudder> way back in the day.

The truth is that practical exams are just as removed from reality as 
multiple choice. And practical exams are not reproducible, results 
can't be shown to be consistent after repeated attempts and are 
influenced by the testee's mood. You can't validly compare two people 
writing different practical exams and prove you are comparing apples 
and apples. Multiple choice don't have these shortcomings. Note that 
this is a failing of the testing method and doesn't reflect on what 
RH have built.

> Credentials that indicate a certain level of knowledge regarding
> the inner mysteries of Ubuntu ;-) will be worth something, and
> having an exam offers a standard benchmark.  But is administering
> Ubuntu harder than other distros?  If not, then to a large extent
> this exam seems ALMOST a re-brand- ing of an LPI variant. 
> Advantage: It gets Ubuntu's name out in the field in yet another
> way, both via the exam itself, and the folks who walk around later
> with a piece of paper proclaiming them to be Certified Ubuntu
> Uber-Geeks, as people will ask what exactly that means.

It's not a re-brand. LPI exams have to be relevant to every distro 
from fast-moving Ubuntu to staid Debian to Peanut to CentOS. So some 
old stuff is in there (bind8, XFree86) and some cool new stuff isn't 
as it has yet to settle down and be representative of all (udev, hal)

Nothing in the Ubuntu exam overlaps with LPIC-1, we even had to omit 
Postfix - it looks and feels so much like sendmail that the results 
wouldn't measure much. So it was dropped to make way for other stuff.

> However, there seems to me to be a dearth of certifications
> regarding coding/packaging/developing for any distro.  Honestly, I
> haven't really looked.  Maybe they're out there and not as well
> advertised as the LPI and RHCE stuff. (I didn't look for LPI or
> RHCE either, but was aware of them from several sources.)  It would
> be "most excellent" if Ubuntu could make a name for itself in that
> area.  In particular, it would be cool to have this available at
> the secondary school level. I know at least one teacher that would
> love to have Python be at the core of his state-wide advanced
> placement exam standards. ;-)

If you want a coding cert, enroll for a BSc Comp Sci. No other method 
ever tried seems to be worth much in terms of a cert. The problem 
with a coding exam is that they are horrible to develop and even more 
horrible to mark. They take loooooong to develop and by the time we 
get them out the door, they are obsoleted by new language versions. 
The marking can't be automated and it has to be examined line by line 
by a human who is qualified to judge quality. The market for them is 
also small at this point and the expense in development isn't 
justified. Sad, but true.

I'd also love a Python exam, and I can build one for you if you want. 
A wild guess quote: US$500,000 development cost, call me this time 
next year for the exam. We can dream, but I doubt we'll see it soon.

> As for exam cost, in addition to discounts, scholarships and/or
> "special" rates, perhaps some sort of barter could be established.
> Volunteer for community service, contribute code, etc. That may
> prove to be an administrative nightmare, but if not, it would be a
> possibility for growing the community by having "stockholders"
> "invest" in the community, not just in the certificate.

There has to be $ changing hands, unless the sabdfl is prepared to 
finance the cert in perpetuity. There are courier costs for the 
written exams, Prometric and Thomson Vue want their slice for 
computer delivered exams. Clerical staff need to be paid, proctors 
have to be transported to the exam venue to supervise, etc, etc. $100 
is dirt cheap, compare what it costs to write some other exams. 

Remember that the target market for these exams is those recently 
started on the One True Way to Ubuntu Enlightenmnet. The idea is to 
help him get a job providing support to users using Ubuntu so it's 
not unreasonable to expect him to contribute something out of his own 
pocket towards his future career.

> Finally, Ubuntu's done an excellent job of building a community of
> non- technical users.  I'm not certain what sort of "certification"
> is appropriate, but something other than membership in the
> Community Council might be useful.  I don't know if there's a good
> objective way to measure who qualifies.  Whatever sort of
> recognition is available, it should be something that carries some
> weight outside of IRC meetings -- an endorsement of the individual
> that says to an outsider, "We the great and powerful
> [Oz|CC|Canonical|sabdfl] do hereby stand behind so-and-so as
> someone who has the best interests of the community at heart, and
> has demonstrated that via x, y, and z.  Although perhaps not the
> most technically skilled person we've ever encountered, we
> encourage you to trust this individual in helping you build your
> community. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.)"

Good idea, as people like to be recognized for their work. I can think 
of a few folk I'd like to nominate :-)

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five