Greetings, all:
I’ve been certified as a CLP (Principal) since early R4, and am finally scheduling the 601 to get up to date with R6.
I’ve toyed with the concept of dual certification for a long time, and have not been able to conclude its value. I’ve plenty of anecdotal information both pro and con, but no hard statistical studies (beyond some inferences from the 2000 salary survey - hey, IBM, any updates to that coming soon? 4 years can be a professional lifetime in these heady techology days) From my perspective, it seems the administration “side” of the House of Domino has become significantly more complex since I took the first Admin exam way, way back in R4.11. The addition of the JVM, SMTP, HTTP and HTTPS tools and controls alone makes for a daunting learning curve - security, deployment and basic server controls aside! (And how about that notes.ini? Hoo Hah!)
So how about it, Notesky’s? Is it worth the expense of classes and exams for an R6 developer to snare the R6 admin certification? Does it increase my ‘marketability’? Will it impress my clients, and allow opportunites for better rates? Do the ladies find it more appealing? Okay, maybe the last one is stretching it a bit.
But seriously, I’d like to hear from anyone who has captured the “double Principal” in R6, and whether it has enhanced the opportunities, both programmatic and financial. If you don’t wish to post, please send me an email at the address in my profile.
Regards,
MC
Subject: The value of dual certification
Matt,
I am going to wax poetic on a soapbox here for a short bit.
I feel that the best developers are the ones who also know administration (thoroughly) and the best admins have at least a basic understanding of development (Preferably and advanced understanding). That way communication is easier and development pitfalls are less likely to occur.
I am a Dual Principal for R5 and ND6 and this fact got me a long term contract because the client required it (even though no admin work was done on the contract). They used it to weed out the “pretenders” or “paper tigers” holding CLP App Dev certifications.
Subject: RE: The value of dual certification
Its funny you mention that - one of my partners in crime is looking over a possible contract, and he said, “I need you because you don’t just stay on the development side of the fence - you understand the admin side, too.”
However, I’m a functional kind of player - I don’t accumulate knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. “Is it useful” is one of the first questions I ask whenever confronted with something new.
I’ll take a look at the full path to dual certification. If its just a matter of spinning up a couple of servers and clients and hitting the books for awhile to nail the tests, I’ll make it.
I guess the first time I successfully troubleshoot an SMTP whitelist while billing on a website development project, I’ll be grateful.
Thanks for the reply!
Regards,
MC