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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."
I'd hit it!
Wait a minute... someone's at the door...
OH NO SOMEONE HELP M!???
NO CARRIER
That's all I have to say
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Certifications can be issued by:
- accredited entities: universities, seminaries, etc.; keep in mind: not all 'universities' are accredited, so already there is a difference.
these certificates are usually oriented at a
mandatory curriculum that is defined for more
than one entity, i.e. all accredited
universities of one country. Mutual
recognition or at least offer of remedy
to achieve such, exists then between entity
groups, e.g., all accredited universities
of two countries, let's take for a real example
a European 'diploma' and the requirements to
achieve equivalence with either a U.S.
bachelor's degree (downgrade) or a U.S.
master's degree (upgrade).
This is not limited to Universities, if you
want to enter a European University with your
High School diploma, you will need to take
a year of extra math, local language, etc.
Accredited, recognized entities can also be
professional organizations who offer
professional speciality certifications.
Examples are CISSP, SME certifications,
Pine Mountain group certifications
(e.g. Certified Netanalyst), etc.
The common ground of all these 'real' certifications is that they are independent and reach across boundaries of products, brands, nations, certifying the knowledge about and
skill to use the foundation principles of
the area they are relevant to, across different
vendor products.
Most of these certifications need longer study (i.e. to achieve a masters you need actually to have written significant scientific publications, aka 'papers'), or can only be achieved after having practiced a trade. Typically there is no 'one book' or 'one brochure' to study.
- vendor 'certificates': typically they cover one brand (that vendor's ): Cisco 'certifications', Microsoft 'certifications', etc. Study one book and you get the title. The knowledge does cover exactly that vendor's product operation to any extent desired (from operation to deployment or programming). Vendors try to add also general
topics, basic principles of the area the
products are working in.
But also: vendors introduce their agenda, or
define 'best practices' in away as to avoid to
expose insufficiencies in their products.
Examples: Cisco OSPF topology recommendations
are a pure result it the incapability of their
routers to efficiently handle, say, 30,000 routes
or more (Nortel passport, vector did at their
time benchmark with 400,000 routes sets and a
real OSPF area 0 on the backbone, not tucked
away in some leaf network); Microsoft sports a
4 layer network model, because of their unclean
implementation of networking stacks, incapable of
certain topologies and functions.
This is no bashing, only rednecks and stupid
ID 10 Ts will put it there. People who actually
know what I talk about will agree.
Typically, a vendor 'certification' can be obtained by studying that vendor's materials. Typically therer are crash couses offered, like 'Cisco certification in 9 days guaranteed', or 'Microsoft MCE in 5 days'.
Now to this topic:
a vendor 'certification' does not make a programmer.
Microsoft certifications gear towards use and implementation of Microsoft products, with emphasis on GUI use (typical question is 'where is the button for clear type on/off', or questions related to features only found in a particular vendor's product, like, e.g. the useless IGRP protocols of Cisco which nobody un his normal state of mind would be using anyways).
A vendor 'certification' can be achieved just by sitting down and studying some limited material.
That's what this girl did. Sure, it shows way above average of reading comprehension, but not necessarily programming skills. Keep in mind (if you ever studied the materials (otherwise shut it), that Microsoft certifications do not teach anythng about internals, kernel programming, thread strategies, memory manageme
On the contrary, it devalues the child. Someone so gifted should do something more worthwhile than MS hack training.
I wrote my first 2,000+ line program in 1988 at the age of 9 on a TRS-80 Model II. It was a Clue game; and yes, I used GOTO extensively and could rewrite it in one line of PERL now. I technically learned to code when I was 8 on a neighbor's computer because I didn't have my own. It took me less than a month to code "Clue" after the computer was purchased for $100 at a garage sale. We weren't exactly the best off family financially at the time. My dad worked a blue-collar job (actually wore blue and refused to join the union), and my mom did odd part-time jobs for the local paper doing typesetting. They maybe made $1,800 a month combined. It was a huge investment, I think the owners wanted $150 for it originally so my dad had to talk them down. It was also the only present I got that year, and I still consider it my favorite birthday to this day.
My parents made an investment. Did it pay off? I started my first year of my new job after graduating from college making equal salary to that of my father. Lower cost-of-living in the location is the only reason I don't make more.
C# is only moderately more complicated than Basic. Of course, that's just my opinion, but it is rational and educated. I don't program in the language on a regular basis, nor do I care to. She has written a calculator and a sorting program? I wrote fscking Clue!
As a guy from our church, whose computer I always used, said to my father when he was determining whether or not to fork over $150 for my second computer, an IBM 8088 with a 10 meg hard-drive, "He doesn't use the computer to just play games, he *writes* them."
I would be surprised if there weren't at least a few hundred individuals like me that were programming at age 10 or earlier or had written their first BBS at age 16; I had a buddy that wrote one when he was 14. If I can do it, I know I can't be the only one.
Please don't insult us by posting this drek. This little girl may end up letting attention go to her head and never bother to fine-tune her coding skills, which will set her back great strides. Then again, maybe she is a child prodigy, but I'd like to see her code before I determine that.
Not mentioned in the story is that she has a 5 digit slashdot user id and has secretly been a slashdot editor since age 4.
Yes, I agree six hours a day, 280 days a year is way too much for $40,000- $60,000 a year.
Most high school and middle school teachers get planning time during the day! At the school where I worked they received 2 hours of planning time a day, and only worked 7 hour days (planning time included.) Most of the time in the classrooms the teachers weren't actively teaching. Either the kids were silently reading/doing homework or they were watching a video (this happens more often than the public thinks.) That should give them more time to grade tests and papers, and if they went home and spent another hour or two on paper grading and planning (most of the time the teachers used the same lesson plans year to year) that's only 8 or 9 hours of actual work.
And then they have the summer off and at least a week or two for every major holiday.
As far as compensation goes they get awesome medical/dental/vision coverage and an excellent retirement plan.
Add to that, the protection of a strong union. They are damn near impossible to fire for just about any cause. Think back to how many shitty teachers you had in high school. How many businesses would keep around ineffectual workers? It's because once they get tenure (Why the F*** do public school teachers need tenure anyway. It's not like they're doing controversial research. Which is the real reason for tenure.)
And for all of this they top out around $62K? I think they're getting a bargain, and we're paying teachers too much.
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