[AlexGizis]

It's been tried and failed: Sun Microsystems pushed certifications in the 90s. Pass the test on some technology, get the certification. Then they studied performance. The result? More certifications implied a worse employee. The reason was the top performing employees had no time to study for the exams, but the managers of the bottom performing employees were happy to send them off to training and testing. And then the certification fad came mostly to an end.

[benatkin]

That was something quite different that got tried. This would be more based on aptitude rather than knowledge.

Of course, they'd miss out on some good talent. But in the article where it shows the quote of someone getting rejected for not inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard, that doesn't seem like a terrible thing to test for.

[jarsin]

I always felt like the Sun and Cisco certs were more about creating people that would push their products on other companies.

Big Tech / Unicorn / Wannabe Unicorn prescreens are all basically standardized now anyway.