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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."
Either the kid is really bright, or if a nine year old can pass them, what value is there?
WTF? Over?
one of the MCP exams did take me five minutes to finish - if this 9 year old girl beat that my ego is battered!
:(
I mean, shes 9 - and she's a girl
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who told all the world to suck it
Selling insecure code
He sure was a chode
And his ethics could not fill a bucket
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
I started programming at 10..
:)
of course... a lot of it was stuff like..
10 print "k-mart sucks dick!"
20 goto 10
entered on a commodore 64 at a local k-mart store for all the passer bys to see
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
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?
As a whole, they're pretty easy - someone half-way bright could cram for them.
The summary does her down, BTW; it says she's MCP, which means passed any one exam, including some piss-takingly simple ones on the administration tracks, whereas she's actually got MCAD which means she's passed a number of developer exams. Yes, some of those are just cram windows features but one of those, the architecture one, actually needs some experience and thought. Or at least it did back in my day when the exam was new - maybe there's "here's all the answers" books for that too now.
-- a VC++ 6 MCSD.
What a coincidence. I spent the day interviewing people for a sysadmin job at my work. We had this one guy (with terrible body odour) who had loads of "certificates" ... but he could barely answer any of our questions except by re-phrasing them and saying them back to us. He didn't get hired - but he had so many certificates from "training colleges"
No-one hires someone just because they can obtain a certificate. I bet you could train a monkey to get a Micr0$oft Cert1ficat3 - but you still wouldn't hire them or give them a position of authority and responsibility.
The fact that a 10yr old child can obtain a Microsoft Certificate means that it's no indication of total worth as a software developer or employee.
What a worthless comment.
The article was an insightful look at life through the eyes of a very brave young woman growing up in a society that does not offer many opportunities for women.
Having written a calculator and a sorting program in C# along with earning her MCAD, I consider Arfa a computer programmer by any definition.
Arfa has demonstrated considerable creativity, imagination, hard work and considerable drive. I'll gladly give up your job for her to find good work =p
From this article ( http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040216/asp/bengal/s tory_2900904.asp ) on Feb 16 2004 report that an 8 year old boy is the youngest. I'm not a math wiz. But last time i checked on elementairy school. 10 > 8.
What's going on here?
"Now having said that, the MCP that this article refers to is a big joke."
Microsoft Certified Application Developer is what she got according to TFA.
While its no MCSD (which she does plan on doing) or MCSE , there was plenty of C# dev in it.
East Coast Brewers
From the point of view of adult programmers an MCAD may not count for a lot, and Microsoft may be a nasty company, but this is still an impressive little girl with an interesting story. There aren't a lot of nine year olds who can write C#. That's a good bit harder than some baby Basic, if for no other reason than the detail that you have to take care of and the object-orientation. And not very many nine year olds have the interest and dedication to pursue something like this.
Its also important to realize that this is a little girl in a country that gives very few opportunities to women, especially women who are not from the upper class. According to the article, her dad is a soldier. It doesn't sound like she comes from a wealthy, powerful family. So, while getting this certificate may well not make her a genius, it does make her a smart and persistent little girl who has done something quite unusual not only for her age but, in her country, for her gender. I say good for her, good for her family for encouraging her rather than telling her not to act unladylike, and good for Microsoft for giving her the trip. (But if I were in charge at Microsoft, I would have thrown in a stop at Disneyland.)
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.
Now having said that, the MCP that this article refers to is a big joke.
From the article The certification she received was as a Microsoft Certified Application Developer.
That's 3 development exams
An experienced developer would need to study for these.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
i was skeptical as well..MCSE's are not particularly well regarded. However, the MCP exam she passed seems much more in depth than just getting certified in excel: "She has created basic Windows applications, such as a calculator and a sorting program, primarily in the C# programming language. The certification she received was as a Microsoft Certified Application Developer. She says she plans to pursue a more advanced certification, as a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, which involves building programs into a broader system for a business." Thats C#, not VB! I'm not an MS expert, but I say thats pretty damn good for a nine year old!
once you go slack, you never go back
It is a given that for every brilliant person in the world, there is another with the same capabilities who never had the same opportunities. Every Beethoven, Euler, or olympic sprinter had potential or technical equals, they just didn't end up in the right position for us to hear about them. That doesn't stop us from celebrating the ones who do it. The biggest lesson we can take away from this is that we should encourage these kids. Not say "sure, you did it, but other people could have, too."
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
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.
Mozart was recognized as a genius through general consensus over time and through direct exposure to his works, not by a rigid test drafted by a corporation.
If you recall, there have already been cases of very young kids acing the college board tests, due to very careful tutoring and memorization. Having taken the MS tests, i can hardly imagine that approach wouldnt work if done well enough.
Not to discredit the kid, this is an accomplishment certainly, which indicates atbest a very strong computer aptitude and at worst a very very good memory, both of which are extremely useful skills. But i hardly compare this with mozart.