Is the Java certification program offered by Sun really the route to a higher salary and better quality of code for businesses? I have my doubts.

In my fifth year of Java programming, after being involved in several distributed developments for large companies, a prospective employer tested my ability. "Don't worry," he said, "you'll have no trouble; this is for beginners."

Unfortunately I failed and was embarrassed - it was a dismal score. He asked me why I had scored so low and with my career and self-belief crushed and broken and in ruins on the grey carpet-tiles, I mumbled something about IDEs, esoteric details of thread control, and tricky default behavior. I dashed from the building and imagined him later berating the agent for sending somebody so obviously lying about his experience.

But I wasn't lying. For 10 years I hadn't created a source file or method name from scratch - the IDE had done it for me. I never had cause to use Java threads, and I avoided the use of default behavior on principle. When I first began programming in Java, integrated development environments already existed that created the files and provided all the correct packages and imports.

Never once was I concerned with the correct syntax for the main() method or the Java source file. What mattered to me was creating an understandable design and hitting the business goals. As a team leader, if one of my coders had written examples like the ones I'd been tested on, I'd have sent him or her on a training course to learn the language.

I later discovered that the interview questions had come from the Sun Java certification. While finding out more about certification I came across the following quotes on the Web:

"I am a Java Certified Programmer and the only thing I've gotten out of it is the ability to say that it's been exactly useless to me."

"I had hoped that certification might carry some clout, but it isn't turning out that they have as much clout as the certification vendors would have you believe."

"I'm an SCJP and SCJD. They're absolutely useless in your career."

This attitude of irrelevance is confirmed by the statistics on JobServe (the largest job database for IT personnel in the UK: www.Jobserve.co.uk). A search for Java returned 1,498 current jobs, while a search for Java and Certified returned just 10 current jobs. About 0.7% of positions ask for certification.

I decided to take the test despite the evidence and discovered that learning Java for the real world and learning it for the exam are not the same. The exam curriculum is well intended but seems to encourage dubious practices that only an experienced programmer would know about. After passing with 80%, I was left wondering why Sun had created such devious questions. My rule of thumb is that if you can't comprehend it immediately, it's wrong. Many of the questions in the exam require careful study - the exact opposite of what we, as programmers, should be trying to achieve.

Instead I would like to see the exam concentrate on the process of programming rather than the code itself; to me you can be a first-class developer, without knowing all the grammatical details, by concentrating on clarity. Businesses require the production of quality, maintainable code in a timely manner, and this can be tested. For example, the following subjects should be covered:

1. Comment this section of code.
2. Rewrite this code to be self-documenting.
3. How to avoid threading. The proliferation of unnecessary threading is a personal irritation. I went through 10 years of development on huge systems without needing to create threads, and now they appear everywhere.
4. What is wrong with this dry run?
5. Write the code this flow chart represents.
6. Provide suitable names for these classes.

You can learn more about the Java certification program at http://training.sun.com/US/certification/java/index.html.