Big companies and government hire armies of cheap contractors to do the grunt work that keeps the company growing.
A tax collector doesn’t want creative programmers. They want a repeatable process that meets their procurement rules. They may even deliberately choose to make sure that nobody knows how everything works! They boil down a process into functional components, and hire cheap labor to fill in the blanks.
When you’re paying a body shop $40 an hour to have someone move across the planet to sling J2EE or whatever, you’re getting what you pay for. (Remember the contractor would probably get a raise working the night shift at Taco Bell) These certifications boil down to a third party attesting that you sat down somewhere and wrote hello world. In that market, it is valuable.
Writing crud websites with spring/.net ms isn't really that difficult. The work is largely done, you just have to fill in a few small details (your domain models, your db credentials, your endpoint paths, your validation rules, your css, your logging configuration and a few templates html pages) and you are done. The sites have very low load, they have almost 0 concurrent writes for the same db entity, and the front-end is largely a simple form.
Operations are handled by a different team than the initial development team - they don't even need to know how to deploy the thing. It's code by numbers, and in that situation, it pays to have someone that doesn't deviate from the number system and the low need for creativity drives the value of the work down and makes the code into a commodity product. Value is low, competition is high, margins are low. Certification is just a sign that you are open for business in that market.
I suspect that a large fraction of the software in use is written at least in part using that method. Now you can debate whether that software actually works or not, but I think that its value is not net negative.
A little bit of both. The body shop outsources the risk of putting butts in chairs, and removing them when you’re done.
It’s crap work for crap pay. In the 70s and 80s when this stuff was new, it made sense to “grow” and train operators and more blue collar folks driven by runbooks and tight frameworks. Nowadays you just hire low skill folks “off the shelf”.
A tax collector doesn’t want creative programmers. They want a repeatable process that meets their procurement rules. They may even deliberately choose to make sure that nobody knows how everything works! They boil down a process into functional components, and hire cheap labor to fill in the blanks.
When you’re paying a body shop $40 an hour to have someone move across the planet to sling J2EE or whatever, you’re getting what you pay for. (Remember the contractor would probably get a raise working the night shift at Taco Bell) These certifications boil down to a third party attesting that you sat down somewhere and wrote hello world. In that market, it is valuable.