How many of you have a professional programming qualification? Either from an educational institution (e.g. a CS degree) or something like Sun Java certification? Is it even possible, useful or desirable to get "recognised" qualifications in other programming languages? Or are most of us self-taught? - Neil Saunders

Useful for what? For landing a job with an established software company, a CS degree seems like a good idea. For a job at an outsourcing company in India, certification is a must. But if it's actual programming skills you're after, nothing beats practice (even if it's just with an open source hobby project). Ideally you get to work with people who have more experience than you do, so you're not just "self-taught", but also "group-taught". - Eric Jain

Useful for bioinformaticians and computational biologists. Just interested to know if this has affected career development for anyone; either within those subject areas, or if they've moved out into other jobs; e.g. people who've left academic life science research to become software developers. - Neil Saunders

I would think in most cases, commercial and academic, a good track record with some awesome projects would trump certification. FWIW, we don't have many people with certs, but Masters and PhDs are still common. - Matt Wood

Let me put it this way: You don't want to work for a place that filters candidates for a software development position based on their formal qualifications, rather than their experience. For what it's worth: I have some formal qualifications for being allowed near computers, but as far as I can tell that was never a factor (both in and outside of academia) for being invited to an interview or hired. Arguably that's a rather small and biased sample set, but there you go. - Eric Jain

I got RHEL certified at one point, but it was only because work paid for it to happen. But I'm a 'biologist turned informatician' and therefore have no qualifications in any CS related field - just experience! - Daniel Swan

I am self taught, no professional qualification. I thought of getting certifications but in the end decided not to, as I thought it wouldn't be useful getting them. - Paulo Nuin

I have a double bachelor's degree in CS and Bio. I felt that it helped me get into a comp bio graduate school program, at any rate. As for certifications, I personally see them as a waste of time, as most biologists in academia couldn't care less how you munge their data, as long as you do it quickly and efficiently. I'd be interested to hear if things are different in industry. - Chris Miller

The only reason I know some people got certified was because it helped them focus down and learn something they wanted to. I haven't been in any situation during a hiring decision where certification comes into play. I'd rather be pointed to a website someone has developed or some code that's on sourceforge - Deepak Singh

I've never heard of anyone asking for professional bioinformatics certification. Publish, show your previous work, yes. But certification? Never. - Andreas Matern from Alert Thingy

I have a bioinformatics masters degree, which was taken post-PhD. As part of that I was taught Java, but very much in a 'Java for Bioinformatics' style. Maybe my approach to projects earlier in my career would have benefited from some software engineering training, but you pick that stuff up as you go along :) - Simon Cockell

I have no certification, just a master's in Bioinformatics where I was taught Java, Linux and R. I taught myself Ruby. I've got no interest in certification and I think Chris Wansworth's short essay is a good guide to follow - https://gist.github.com/0a2655a... . I think this echoes the same sentiments expressed above. - Michael Barton