Insecure Geeks... is it still really all about the size of your hard drive?

I am still working my way through a few tests on the JavaBlackBelt site, an 'open certification' kind of site that (some tell me) has been around for a while now. I have done a couple of the simple tests to get my 'yellow belt', the lowest level certification they will give me without having to invest a great deal of time in designing tests, questions, comments and so on. I am not yet certain its worth the effort, and it appears the emphasis at JavaBlackBelt is much more on test design than test taking. The equivalent would be telling someone to use Hibernate but they could not do a pre-fetch query unless they submitted 3 code enhancements to the codebase first. A little onerous, I am thinking.

Anyway, I took the 'Introductory OO test' and failed it. Shame on me, right? Well, first I only failed two questions, and I was only allowed to fail one. Missed it by.... THAT much! This blog is really about the style of questions that the test was presenting.

In an earlier blog on certification I mentioned that I would look forward to some kind of certification tests. Well, so far the ones at BlackBelt are definitely not the kind I am looking for. They are testing in a style I remember well from my school days (yes, I still remember my school days), and I felt the same sense of frustration answering these BlackBelt questions as I felt back then. In short, the questions were not testing my depth of knowledge, but instead focused on clever tricks to try and fool me into picking the wrong answers.

That in itself, while annoying and close to pointless, is not the main problem. I found the whole approach of reading a piece of code and describing why it would or would not compile absolutely a waste of time. Today's Java IDE's compile as you type, and even auto-complete statements with suggestions on how to remove the compile issue. Why would I bother trying to figure out if something can compile by 3 minutes of scrutiny to uncover the arcane subterfuge a tester has wrapped around a trivial compile bug when any IDE that is better than Notepad will highlight the error, autosuggest a fix and implement the fix with a single keystroke? What am I being tested on then?

It smacks of the geeky bravado I used to see in Computer Science school that used to make me sigh and go find some of my old Geology buddies to drink with. You know the guys I am talking about - the ones that organized Friday night programming contests. I remember hearing of one where the goal was to see who could write a C program that functioned as a Notepad in as few characters as possible - variables, syntax tokens, white space all counted. Doesn't anybody want to go to the sports bar and try and pick up the waitress anymore?

So I will keep trying a few more tests, and I hope I will eventually get to one that actually tries to test me on an aspect of programming design, implementation or execution that can't be auto-completed by an IDE faster than I can type. Otherwise its back to the bar. I am POSITIVE that waitress smiled at me, even before she saw the tip I left her....