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>So, Bill, let's hear a couple of answers from you. What is it that you want
>to solve with certification? I don't want pithy
>for-the-good-of-all-humankind answers, I want to know what you feel you
>will personally gain from certification. What makes the idea worth the
>money and trouble to you? What is your experience as a techwhirler or as a
>hiring manager that has led you to believe certification will mean what you
>hope it to mean?
You gave exactly the kind of nothing answer I asked not to receive:
> Certification will give us a real profession with identifiable and
>certifiable skills. We won't just be a gang of people doing whatever pleases
>us and making some money at it. It will give us a way not just to learn
>skills but to be qualified for them. And it will put members of the
>profession in the driver's seat to decide the standards for the skills that
>define the profession.
ONCE AGAIN: (I'll even skip the original second question since it was
merely a clarification of the first one)
1. What do *YOU* want? Are you looking for more money? A better job? I
already have a real profession, and I bet most of the people on this list
are horrified to find out that they haven't had a real profression all
these many years. So what do *YOU* want?
2. What is *YOUR* experience? Are *YOU* a recent college grad? An
experienced writer who has been writing technical documents since before
MILSPEC was introduced? How many different jobs have you had? Have you ever
been in a position to hire techwhirlers? What is your educational
background? A lot of us have gone out of our way to explain to you exactly
why we don't feel the need for certification, and we have cited real
experience. Up until now, you have merely mouthed pithy platitudes and
given no response to the fact that any type of certification whatsoever
would exclude a certain percentage of our "real profession" from being able
to participate any longer. Tell us about yourself. Upon what experience is
your pro-cert position based?
Up until this point, everything Bill has written has indicated that he is
deliberately seeking to incite reactions from those of us who wish to
defend the perfectly happy status quo. In my book, this is called
"trawling" and is second only to the dreaded spam for ruining a
newsgroup/listserv. Since I assume I will still not receive any
satisfactory answers from Bill, I will drop out of the ruckus, since I
refuse to deal with someone I don't know. Bye!
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