Has anyone done the Serokell Certification yet? Should I?

#1

I’ve just signed up (but not paid) for this new Haskell Certification by Serokell: https://certification.serokell.io/

I’m unsure whether it’s worth it. I was uneasy at first because they ask for your ID number up front. Only after registering you learn about the price of the certification, it’s 49 € for each level. I found it shady to learn about that price only after registering. Now I’m wondering whether that’s just money thrown out of the window, or something that will actually help me on the job market.

Do you think that certification is worth its money? Opinions especially appreciated by people who have already completed the certification (and possibly used it in an application process), or who are part of a hiring/selection process in some organisation.

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#2

Looks like a cash grab. With or without such certificate, every company will still want to have a technical interview with you. I know I would.

Haskell job offers are scarce, and there are not many haskellers. It’s not hard to stand out from the crowd. Might be a good thing to have when applying to a junior position, but apart from that I think it’s a waste of money.

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#3

From a hiring position: I don’t remember ever seeing this on a CV, and it wouldn’t particularly affect how I interview or the decision I make. I think my reaction to it would be something like: “okay, this person probably knows a bit of Haskell and can do small tasks with well defined specs. I still need to test them myself, partly because I don’t know how rigorous the test is, partly because I want to know things it probably isn’t testing, and partly to help me compare to other candidates”.

I can imagine it would make a CV more likely to get an interview in the first place (I’m not involved at that stage).

I can also imagine that if I started to see a significant number of CVs with this certification, and every one of them turned out to be a skilled engineer, it would start to affect my approach then, but this seems unlikely. From where I stand right now, it seems like Serokell’s telling you that I (as a potential employer) will pay attention to this certification, but they’re not telling me why I should pay attention to it. (At least not on that page. Maybe they have a different page for employers?)

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#4

Could we as a community have a bit more good faith in each other, unless proven otherwise? Come on, 49 € are unlikely to recoup resources spent and ongoing in the foreseeable future.

There are might be different views on this certification program, but insinuating cash grab is bizarre.

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#5

TBH, given the variety of dialects of Haskell, as well as the differing proficiency levels, Haskell needs certification.

Moreover, if you’re just a Haskell hobbyist and never going to be Haskell-in-production, a Haskell cert can look good on your CV for a C# job or some other job as a brag and to get something back for the hundreds of hours you spent learning Haskell.

Remember, we’re rapidly approaching an environment where every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane “knows” Haskell, for some definition of “know”. Consider that quite a few intro courses for Haskell don’t even teach monads, so you can “know” Haskell (“It was in my intro course”) and not really understand what’s happening when you’re using do notation.

Honestly, this is something Haskell Foundation should be doing, not Serokell, but if Serokell wants to provide this service to the community, more power to them.

If you think this feels like a cash grab, that’s the wrong way to see it. Treat it as a donation instead; even if you absolutely don’t need a Serokell cert (i.e, you are Simon Marlow / SPJ), you’re a paying beta-tester and helping to solidify the certification environment in Haskell.

Serokell, thank you so much for this!

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#6

I am not a recruiter but I suspect “I help maintaining haskell-project-X” or “I wrote library y” or “I had this big patch merged in haskell-project-z” will do fine too. Tending the ecosystem shows your skills and also how you work with people and how you approach problems with limited resources, things that a certification will not highlight.

I am not against paid resources, certifications worth the paper they are written do not come by frequently and usually require a considereable investment of time and resources, so I understand skepticism.

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#7

From other posters, and what I know of the Haskell community, I don’t think the certification is very useful for job hunting purposes, but for ancillary purposes (giving hobbyists something to work toward / show for their time, providing hiring standards for skeptical firms considering a Haskell experiment, giving a junior Haskeller a leg up on recruitment) it is extremely useful.

My attitude toward this is that Serokell certification is one to two-levels above a Haskell T-shirt. It’s 50 EUR. A ultra-black novelty T-shirt (can’t remember link) is around 50 EUR, so’s many AAA video games.

Over time, Serokell certification may become more valuable than it currently is (if the Haskell job market grows), but it’s more a donation for the community.

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#8

I’d be very happy to take the certificate myself if it was provided by (and/or all funds would go to) Haskell Foundation, not a private company.

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#9

What if HF endorsed it and had a profit-sharing scheme with Serokell? Certifications and examinations, especially if they’re quality, cost manpower and money to do; I doubt HF would want to put in the outlay for it, but Serokell is willing to sell what amounts to novelty t-shirts right now.

If this project is successful, I’m pretty sure HF will want to get involved because Serokell certs are not canonical.

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#10

Their cofounder John Mostovoy referred (in Russian unfortunately) to software engineers as “people who don’t do anything using their hands” in a public discussion while arguing that expecting a certain salary (a number $100k+/y was mentioned in the same message) is “entitlement”. I asked if this was the official position of Serokell and John confirmed. The other cofounder Arseniy Seroka participated in the same discussion and didn’t seem to mind what John said.

I wouldn’t pay them a dime.

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#11

I don’t see Serokell-the-company as part of the Haskell community, it being a company. (Of course, the people who work there doing Haskell are part of the community.) I’d assume Serokell-the-company does Haskell because it is profitable for them, not because they want to charitably support the Haskell community. So I’m not really on board with doing the certification in order to “donate” or give back to the community. They’d probably bill the cost of two such certifications or more in one hour of consultancy work.

It’s fairly new, this is probably why.

That’s a really good observation. If employers have no way of understanding what the exam covers (apart from paying one of their people to take it themselves), it’s not useful in an application process.

Absolutely agree.

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#12

I see it a bit differently. I see all the companies who use Haskell, and contribute to its ecosystem, as very much part of the Haskell community. Many of them contribute ideas, manpower, libraries, and (in quite a few cases) direct sponsorship of the Haskell Foundation. The Haskell community is a gift economy, and for-profit companies are totally part of that economy.

Of course, every company has to look after its customers, and make enough money to flourish, or it’ll die, and rapidly stop contributing the the Haskell community. So company objectives and community objectives are not 100% aligned, and I’m not pretending they are. But neither are they orthogonal; companies that use Haskell benefit from a thriving community, and many of them see it as in their interest to contribute to the community.

Returning to certification, I’m not very well informed about the job market, but in general some kind of Haskell certification programme makes a lot of sense to me. Yes, ultimately the HF would be the ideal certification authority, as an independent non-profit organisation. But it takes energy and work to develop a certification programme, which the HF does not have enough of. If Serokell is willing to inject that energy I am very grateful to them. (We’d have to ask them, but I think their dream would be that the programme is a great success, and they hand over the certification side to HF, leaving companies, Serokell among them, to provide training and support for people wanting to get certified. There are many bridges to cross first of course including getting past the chicken-and-egg problem that no employer seeks Haskell certification because non exists.)

As @bodigrim says I think we should assume good intentions. I chatted to Arseniy at Zuihac and those good intentions were very evident. Thanks Serokell!

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#13

Notice that, for example, they are founding the Dependant Haskell work. Also they colaborate with HF. that’s a lot of community effort

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#14

Alright, that is a good point. Although I’d still argue that it’s a different way to be involved in the community from how, e.g. I am involved in the community. I have an emotional attachment to the community and will contribute even if I don’t have a financial benefit. I suppose the same is true for most HF members. Very probably also for Haskell employees at Serokell, but I’m unsure about management.

#15

Very probably also for Haskell employees at Serokell, but I’m unsure about management.

They do quite a lot of stuff for the community: from funding work on GHC to creating open source libraries to writing blog posts to interviewing Haskellers to sponsoring the Haskell Foundation and so on. I believe it is very unfair to suggest that the company isn’t a part of the community or second-guess the attitude of the management towards Haskell.

(my concerns in the message above are only about their attitude towards people, not tools)

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#16

Somehow I find that these two statements are a bit contradictory :wink:

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#17

I’m not sure why you do. One can acknowledge plentiful contributions of a company while still disagree with bold statements made by their management. Or at least that’s how I look at it.

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#18

4 posts were split to a new topic: On Capital, Labour and tech companies

#19

Hello, everyone!
I’m Arseniy, CEO at Serokell.
Thank you for initiating this discussion. Although we haven’t fully publicized the certification program, there was a presentation at Zurihac, and it’s great to see that people are aware of it :blush:

Allow me to explain what the program is, our objectives, and the goals we aim to achieve.
The world of Haskell, including its standards and development practices, is both unique and fragmented. We also highlight the problem that it’s always hard to find “typical” Haskell developer, because people do always have different experiences and, of course, ways of program designs and architectures. This can lead to issues when substituting developers, or even result in code rewriting or the adoption of alternative technologies for projects. We recognize that multiple factors contribute to this situation, but the absence of consistent development standards and benchmarks for developers is one of the concerns, especially if we talk about big and enterprise companies.

Over the past few months, we have been working on building this platform. As an experienced Haskell company, we are leveraging our expertise in development, education, and hiring to create a comprehensive testing program for Haskell developers. In addition, I have personally been teaching functional programming for the past eight years. We intend to use all of this knowledge to establish a formal, rigorous, and objective evaluation platform.

However, it’s important to note that our motivation is not driven by personal profit. The exam fees will never cover all the resources we have invested in this project. Instead, the funds generated will be utilized for maintenance and deployment support.
The primary objective of our certification program is to become the official one for Haskell. There is no sense to make several different ones – that would make all of them completely useless at the same time.

Our vision is to provide a non-commercial product adopted by Haskell Foundation. And that would offer commercial possibilities for anyone, such as developing educational courses based on the certification topics. This will also benefit the wider Haskell community. Furthermore, this initiative aims to create a pool of qualified candidates for prospective employers.

We have already engaged in discussions with HF and several Haskell companies, not only to adopt this program but also to collaborate closely, particularly in terms of incorporating enterprise experiences and best practices. We really belive and hope that we would establish a unified and robust certification program for Haskell that can benefit both developers and companies alike.

And thank you for kind words about this initiative! <3

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#21

Thanks for explaining to us the goal and funding of the certification.

I understand the program is not yet fully publicised — maybe not complete, even —, but can you share a description/syllabus for those certification “levels” mentioned in OP? Asking for ID to check that feels unnecessary.

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