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  • 1.  Which one is better OCAJP or OCPJP?

    Posted Mar 09, 2020 12:38
    Hello Everyone, I have 1.6 years of coding experience in PHP and I want to become a java certified which I am preparing for certification exam but I am confused between OCAJP and OCPJP. I have checked all exam details like pattern, duration, price and important topics from here. Can anyone knows which is suitable for me?
    #TMForumGeneral

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    Arjun Kumar
    TO BE VERIFIED
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  • 2.  RE: Which one is better OCAJP or OCPJP?

    Posted Mar 10, 2020 03:06
    Dear Arjun,

    I had different experiences in India. And generally, when I met other people, they had similar experiences, too.

    We had an office in India and I was looking forward to getting an experienced IT person. After delicate sifting thru the CVs, I finally short-listed 3 people and I chose the guy with the most certificates. This was rather because of the distance from HQ and India. After a month, I paid a visit to India and I started suspecting that this guy could not live up to his certificates. After a while, we had an emergency and we asked him to provide us connectivity to a server in the DMZ of of huge CSP in India. All he needed to do was to plug in the 3G modem in USB port and after running it and turning it on, to check the IP and tell us in order to connect it remotely. It is a basic procedure, is it not? He could not do it and there were not any technical issues. This guy had at least 10 IT certificates (ITIL, COBIT, etc etc.) 

    My colleages in (regards to Adela Dorofei and Anton Nikolaev) Moldova and Kazakhstan have always asked certain questions in interviews and then let it be a sys admin or db admin or a programmer, all job interviews ended up before a terminal and with live demo of skills. 
    Long story short, if you are good, you do not need the certificate. For it does not count, at least, for India. Dont waste your money. If you want to make a difference, I would kindly propose create a blog, a channel on youtube and try to put some articles/videos about programming. I have had the best videos from India on Jira, Organization Development, Enterprise Architecture etc. And when you will try to put the effort, it will develop you much more than preparing for a formatted certification exam. 

    Kind regards,
    NKU

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    Niyazi Korkut ULUAYDIN
    Turkcell Iletisim Hiz AS.
    Istanbul Turkey
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  • 3.  RE: Which one is better OCAJP or OCPJP?

    Posted Mar 10, 2020 14:07
    I tend to agree that certificates are often overrated. By all means find some good courses but in my view don't worry too much about the certificate they grant at the end unless you are specifically going for jobs that require that certification.

    I recently considered doing a certification because some of the contracts I saw were indicating it as a certification which could be in demand. It was a certification for a role that I had been doing for more than two decades with many successful projects and happy customers. I came close to spending a few thousand Euros on training and exams, but decided to pay for the course books instead.

    I didn't recognise anything in the certification that was remotely like what I, and most of my peers, had been doing all this time, nor anything I felt could be genuinely useful or beneficial for projects I might do in the future.

    As for programming languages, aside from training courses, IMO the best way to develop your skills is by gaining experience doing projects. Of course, without the experience it's often difficult to get onto commercial projects. But that's where Open Source projects are a great thing to get involved with. Not only are they good to develop your development and coding skills, but they can teach you things like toolsets, testing frameworks, development frameworks, working in a collaborative development environment, integration, and things like GIT and CI which are invaluable skills regardless of language.

    Github or Gitlab are good places to seek out suitable, interesting projects and these are also where a lot of smart recruiters look for talent.

    Regards,

    Keith

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    Keith Milner
    Superlative Solutions Ltd.
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  • 4.  RE: Which one is better OCAJP or OCPJP?

    Posted Mar 11, 2020 02:39
    Hi Keith,

    In fact, the programming could be kind of separated from the others since it is a different kind of beast. I am terrible in programming but as you concisely  mentioned programming needs more of a blending with the "mud". One needs to be in that environment in order to observe the flow. I asked one of my programmer colleagues to walk me thru his thought path during a programming assignment (while I was handling the customer complaint and deployment issues). I could say I observed two states of mind in the programmer: programing; debugging. I can split debugging into apriori and posteriori. When programming, he was extremely creative and "lazy". By the term lazy he tended to find the pieces of code from other sources instead of writing the code. But that was quite an experience and I felt only the extremely advanced ones can handle it so fast and efficient. In the debugging, apriori part is the time zone until the program runs acceptably well for testing and it continues thru out the testing. Posteriori part is the time zone beyond the testing acceptance phase and they do not like to touch the code since it is kind of "done" for them. Simply, it is not that much enjoyable for them but this is where it makes the difference for support and customer satisfaction. From elementary coding to this advanced level, sitting side by side with an advanced programmer would be the best at least for some time. One's duty is not to become the best programmer over night. It is rather a journey and if you start finding the horseshoes of the caravan, then you can catch it sooner or later. 
    For the certification, I also tend to prefer the books and MOOCs instead of investing into the certification examination costs. Books and courses provides a path and a frame to follow. In most cases, that is sufficiently satisfactory to start collecting the "horseshoes". Rest is hard work to catch up with the caravan. :-)

    Kind regards,




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    Niyazi Korkut ULUAYDIN
    Turkcell Iletisim Hiz AS.
    Istanbul Turkey
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  • 5.  RE: Which one is better OCAJP or OCPJP?

    Posted Mar 11, 2020 03:59
    Hi Niyazi,
    There's some interesting and good observations there. I particularly like the "creatively lazy" aspect and I think that's quite an accurate observation. I think this is an undervalued attribute of a lot of good developers.

    I agree that programming is somewhat different to many other disciplines. There's an aspect of "art" to software development, and some people will have a better developed sense of this art than others, whether this is through nature or nurture (I suspect there are elements of both).

    I agree with using books and MOOCs. These have the advantage that you can use them as much as you need, when you need them, and it's easy to mix and match courses to fill in gaps.

    Regards,

    Keith

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    Keith Milner
    Superlative Solutions Ltd.
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