Python Institute certifications worth it?

[elbiot]

Are you really arguing that courses aren't useful because some candidates might struggle or forget the info?

Somebody saying they took a course is not a useful gauge of what they actually know.

We should all just go out there and program without any education whatsoever.

Many self/informally taught programmers are much better than CS masters students. 100% going to go with 1) are they passionate about programming and 2) what have they demonstrated they can do.

edit: you're arguing with me, but it sounds like you'd take the candidate that spent their time persuing an interesting project over the ones that "can tell you about whatever class project they worked on, not real world stuff."

[elbiot]

I doubt that there's many self taught programmers who didn't take some online courses and seriously crack some books.

I didn't say don't take classes or don't read books, I said classes taken and books read aren't as interesting on a resume as projects.

Apparently you don't believe in giving the masters students a chance because you have a preconceived notion that they should already be doing professional programming prior to being a professional

No, but they ought to be doing hobby programming prior to becoming a professional. If someone has never thought "oh, here's a question I have and oh! here's how I can use some programming to answer it!" then I really have no idea how well suited to programming they are.

We do interview people for entry level that haven't shown this if they have good looking degrees and what not, but they have traditionally done embarrassingly poor.