Re: What happened to Test 972: IBM Certified Specialist - ILE RPG Programmer?

On May 28, 2010, at 10:00 AM, rpg400-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Come to think of it
I'd rather be certified by say Jon & Susan, Scott Klement and Aaron
Bartell etc. than by the (mostly invisible) machine that is IBM.

If you took the test and passed it Jerry then you were effectively certified by at least some of the names you've quoted there ;-)

For the record - I know we all love conspiracy theories and "IBM is deliberately killing the platform" etc. but in this case I really think it is just straight economics. Unless you have been involved in the preparation work for a certification test you have no idea how involved and expensive it is. Simon (sadly) is right. Too few people in North America, Europe and the Antipodes care enough to seek RPG certification and the test (compared to most others) was hard. I know of a number of RPGers who thought they were good who walked away with scores of 60% or so. Several told me that they would not bother to retest.

Contrast that with the other side of the world where the local and outsourcing market means that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people in India, Malaysia, China, etc. who want certification so they can get a job - because it _is_ often a requirement there. With a market that big, there is huge profit to be made by pirating the tests and selling the questions as "test preparation". As a result, these days you are lucky if you can keep the test questions secure for six months. That means a virtual rewrite every six to twelve months even if there are no new features in the language - and that is an enormous expense that you might be able to recoup if you are MS and have hundreds of thousands taking the tests - but not if it is an RPG test.

IBM pulled the plug because there were better things to do with the money in my opinion. Nothing more - nothing less.



Jon Paris

www.Partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com