Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's 10-year-old Certified Professional
idigjazz writes "Meet Arfa, a promising young software programmer from Faisalabad, Pakistan, who is believed to be the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in the world. She received the certification when she was 9. During a recent meeting with Bill Gates, she presented him with a poem she wrote that celebrated his life story."
Before the flood of jokes start, I'd like to ask those of you who are MSCP (I know you're out there) how difficult is it to get that certification? Is this really a child prodigy, or are the questions ultra simple?
Underholdning.info
The girl says it "should" be balanced. Which I read to mean that ideally it should be balanced. It's impossible to know what she exactly meant by that short quote however.
And in general to the people who are scoffing at the MCAD - she's 10 years old. Perhaps that escaped your massive brains but this is an article talking about something that is a good achievement for someone her age. Its not even worth noting for someone only a few years older than her. At 10 most slashdotters were still singing soprano and afraid of girl germs (It seems some still are).
Well done to Arfa and her father. I hope she becomes a very competent member of the software development community. We can all hope she discovers the wonders of open source though...
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
This OTT political correctness/quota balancing act in lots of workplaces is just dumb.
On the other hand, there's no evidence whatsoever that men are more capable than women when it comes to programming or support. And it's fairly ludicrous to assume that women don't get into the field because they just don't feel like it. So we have to ask: what exactly is keeping a field where men have no inherent advantage whatsoever a primarily male-dominated industry?
My guess - based on more than 20 years of purely anecdotal evidence - is that it has something to do with the rampant immaturity and mysogynism of a significant minority of the males who choose some sort of computer work for a profession. And while in those more-than-20-years I've seen a marked improvement in a number of other professions, the same can't be said when it comes to the computer industry. It's still the refuge of an alarming number of childish little brats who hate and fear women, and have no problem whatsoever making any woman who 'invades' their turf feel unwelcome.
But again, that's all anecdotal. It could just be that all the IS departments I've been exposed to during various contracts were just unusual exceptions. And it could also be that I'm going to win the lottery tomorrow, after being struck by lightning - twice.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I gave my four year old son my old Laptop (a working but battered Acer PIII-600 running XP), which he uses to play fun and learning games and visit Web sites such as Cbeebies etc.
He's five now but a few months ago he proudly told me he'd changed his desktop image to match that of my desktop. Spooky!
Oh, just to redeem him - he saw me using a ssh connection to do some admin on one of our Linux servers and was interested in the non-gui-ness of it and the fact that you had to type in commands, so I showed him a few. Now his favourite 'trick' when he sees me logged in is to do a 'df -h' or 'top' for me!
What do you think - RHCE at five??!!
AT&ROFLMAO
MOST of what I found in the microsoft certifications are more based on learning the microsoftspeak and less about specifics.
microsoft went out of it's way to make sure that someone that learned how to admin on their own can NOT pass the tests without buying the coursework or taking classes.
Example? sure...
What partition do you boot from? Boot or system?
if you said boot then you are wrong. Microsoft says you boot from the system partition, and run from the boot partition.. now this was back in my NT4 sertification days, they may have removed that decietful nugget of information by now but I doubt it. they intentionally obfuscate and use backward speak to make sure that someone that had been in computers for 20 years can NOT pass the test without paying for courses or books.
Very scumbaggy of them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First, congratulations to her: yes, it's an accomplishment. The only reason we think it's a major accomplishment, though, is we've been fooled into thinking kids can't learn complex things. We mistakenly think that kids are capable of much less than they are--not because the kids can't perform up to their capability, but because the educational system doesn't do the kids justice.
I was lucky. When I was in elementary school and showed a real gift for computers, several teachers went considerably out of their way to put me in groups of people who knew what they were doing. By the time I was nine, I was spending my summers in the local community college's computer lab. I wasn't taking college courses, no, but my teachers hooked me up with a student named David Carlson and asked if he could just spend an hour each week answering my questions.
David became my best friend in no time flat. An hour a week turned into a considerably more during the summertime, between his jobs and other commitments. I learned LISP from David (on a Symbolics LISP Machine--talk about your sexy hardware). Shortly after I turned ten, David showed me the Y-combinator. It took me a few weeks to understand it, but when I did--whoa! I was blinded, just blinded, by the beauty of it.
Then we moved away to a different city, different school system. Supposedly this one was much better, but there were no longer any teachers who'd go out of their way to recruit college students into letting me hang out with them for a while. They expected me to go through the exact same hoops as anyone else. I wasn't even allowed to take Programming in BASIC at the high school level. No more LISP Machines for me. From '86 to '92, I had no access to any machines more powerful than an Apple IIgs, and no languages more powerful than Basic. I wouldn't get access to a LISP environment again until I got to college in '94.
Now I'm a graduate student. Last semester I took a course in programming language theory, where we were exposed to the beauty of the Y-combinator. And to think... I knew the Y-combinator when I was just ten years old, just due to the kindness of a smart college student who wasn't smart enough to know "the Y-combinator is too much for kids".
David Carlson was the finest teacher I ever had, because he didn't have preconceptions about what I could or couldn't learn. And as soon as we moved away and my education got turned over to bureaucrats who were concerned about "age-appropriate academic skills", I got left out in the cold.
David died a couple of years ago of brain cancer, way before his time; he was barely forty. He left behind a wife and kids, and you know what? I think those kids are going to turn out to be geniuses. Because he and his wife were too damn dumb to know their kids couldn't possibly learn things.
The good thing about that is, that by the time they go into puberty, they will want to break away from everything parents and school push on them, so they'll go into Linux or Mac.
If this particular girl is as smart as they say, by the time she's in her late teens, she probably will want to have the level of control that Windows cannot give her.
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
* 2005-05-05 22:04:04 Nine year old girl becomes an MCP (IT,Microsoft) (rejected)
I wonder what makes the story more interesting now that it is old.
Actually I hold 30 certifications. I no longer hold ANY microsoft certifications as I found they have no real value to someone with over 20 years real experience in IT and IS, Also many managers that are worth working for also feel that way from being burned by hiring MCSE's without any real experience.
Some certs are worthwhile.... Cisco and Novell for example. Others have a much lower value.
Cisco training materials are clear and TRUTHFUL in the information.. Microsoft training materials typically have either ass-backwards information or are full of Corprate-microsoft-newspeak that is 100% worthless in the real world, but required to pass the test. Just try and read the Microsoft published manual for the VB.NET certifications.. the guy slams hungarian notation as useless and confusing. and then has examples that have variable names that in a 45,000 line app will cause the next developer utter hell.
BTW, I recieved my MSCE in 98 and then let it expire to satisfy a stupid PHB requirement that all IT employees be MS certified. after the company spend millions to get that so we could tout a stupid statistic to customers that "all our peopel are certified!" the bean counters promptly dropped the requirement citing expenses. (yay for the bean counters!)
Sorry about the long winded response to the obvious troll from a MS drone but I am in a GREAT mood today.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.