I'm not a Rubyist, but the price tag isn't really the offensive part. 2,800 is fine for 12 2 hour classes. If you include grading and one on one help, it is a potential bargain.
Here is the offensive part (to me, anyway):
Students who successfully complete the six-week program will be certified by General Assembly in Ruby on Rails. Certification is a way for General Assembly to let our partner organizations, start-ups, and others know that a student successfully completed the course.
I know that slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies, but how long before this type of thing becomes the equivalent of a Microsoft certification and is a check-box that HR departments look for when hiring Rails developers?
Now I've got to spend nearly 3k dollars every couple of years to maintain my 'Rails certification', which I don't really need because I learned Rails on my own in a weekend and the point of Rails is that it makes things easy (reasonable defaults and all of that). If you need a certification to learn Rails, something has gone seriously wrong!
If the community legitimizes efforts like this (by not laughing at them and running them out of town on a rail)... There is a possibility that they will give some clout to certification organizations, which could lead to above (fairly unlikely, but plausible) slippery slope situation where you need certs to program Rails.
Don't take offense, but if you learned Rails in a weekend then you didn't spend enough time to really learn all of it.
I don't see this type of certification being bad for people trying to break into development. Anyone with real world experience will still be able to use that experience on a resume or whatever. People relying on certifications to get a job after a few years in the industry are doing things wrong in my opinion.
Comments
I'm not a Rubyist, but the price tag isn't really the offensive part. 2,800 is fine for 12 2 hour classes. If you include grading and one on one help, it is a potential bargain.
Here is the offensive part (to me, anyway):
Students who successfully complete the six-week program will be certified by General Assembly in Ruby on Rails. Certification is a way for General Assembly to let our partner organizations, start-ups, and others know that a student successfully completed the course.
I know that slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies, but how long before this type of thing becomes the equivalent of a Microsoft certification and is a check-box that HR departments look for when hiring Rails developers?
Now I've got to spend nearly 3k dollars every couple of years to maintain my 'Rails certification', which I don't really need because I learned Rails on my own in a weekend and the point of Rails is that it makes things easy (reasonable defaults and all of that). If you need a certification to learn Rails, something has gone seriously wrong!
If the community legitimizes efforts like this (by not laughing at them and running them out of town on a rail)... There is a possibility that they will give some clout to certification organizations, which could lead to above (fairly unlikely, but plausible) slippery slope situation where you need certs to program Rails.
Don't take offense, but if you learned Rails in a weekend then you didn't spend enough time to really learn all of it.
I don't see this type of certification being bad for people trying to break into development. Anyone with real world experience will still be able to use that experience on a resume or whatever. People relying on certifications to get a job after a few years in the industry are doing things wrong in my opinion.
The demand for Ruby developers is so much higher than the supply enough that employers won't demand certifications... at least for now.