Alex Blog: Salesforce Painful Certification Practices

This post is an open complaint towards Salesforce's certification process. This is quite a long post, and you may thing that it is a rant. Well, it very well may be a rant, but these are opinions that must be expressed, and I will gladly take the podium at this time because I haven't heard anyone else complain. I need to discuss a few of Salesforce's terrible certification practices: inconsistent terminology and poor feedback.

The first area of fault that I want to point out is Salesforce's inconsistent terminology. I'm sure you know what I mean if you've studied for or taken any certification exams. I've taken a few Salesforce certification multiple choice exams, the Developer Certification and the Advanced Developer Certification exam. Both of these multiple choice exams were filled with questions that were trickily worded and had choices that were equally as tricky worded. Rather than testing the candidates knowledge and understanding of concepts, these exams seemed to be testing the candidates ability to remember key Salesforce terminology. Salesforce often uses multiple words to describe the same thing, and uses the same words to describe other things as well, and on top of this, they are inconsistent with the usage of this terminology. To test candidates on this inconsistent terminology is a terrible practice.

To move onto the main complaint of this post, I want to discuss Salesforce's feedback on their certification exams. In short, there is none. If you fail an exam, you are not told how close you were to passing, nor were you told in what areas you did poorly. This is key information! It encourages more studying for the next time, and it provides a foothold for that candidate to use to attempt to pass the test next time. Without feedback, taking these tests is like running full speed into a wall. The wall either busts and you pass through, or you fall flat on your backside. You may start to feel insane after feeling the pain of failure three times in a row.

To continue on this point, I want to extend this complaint from written exams to hand-graded exams. If you fail a multiple choice exam, you will certainly remember some of the questions from the exam. Some may intrigue or confuse you and inspire you to research and remember them later. But consider the case of submitting a programming assignment for human review, or giving a presentation before a panel of judges, which are situations one will encounter when attempting Advanced Developer or Salesforce Architect certification. I've failed the Advanced Developer Certification programming assignment once before now, and they did provide feedback to me. However, this feedback seemed to have been computer-generated or mistaken, because when I read the feedback, I have no idea about what part of my code they are marking as a mistake. Moreover, their feedback does not help me to improve!

To provide specific details about the poor feedback Salesforce provides, I'll provide a few excerpts from my last programming assignment results.

"The design approach taken is suboptimal and does not demonstrate an understanding of triggers, order of execution, and platform design principles on the platform." - I'm sorry, but I believe that I am a very pragmatic programmer and that I am *very* familiar with the Salesforce platform. When I read this, I think back on much of the example code I read in Salesforce documentation, and how inefficient and poor they are. So these same Salesforce experts think that my code is very poor? I care a great deal about writing maintainable and efficient code! If they think my code is terrible, point out my mistakes! I would love to fix them and improve the code I write on your platform! Seriously! what code are they looking at?

"Areas for Improvement: Use of aggregate queries" - I am well aware of SOQL's aggregate query functionality, but I found not a single place in the application where it makes sense to use aggregate queries. If they told me that I as required to use an aggregate query, just to demonstrate my knowledge of them, instead of using a single query to get the records I need and looping over them, I could have easily added a second (precious) query just to use an aggregate. I didn't even consider this, however, since Salesforce's governor limits force developers to minimize the number of SOQL queries.

"Areas for Improvement: Conforming to governor limits" - Uh... what? What actionable item or lesson learned can I take away from this? Every single one of my methods were "bulkified", and accept only collections as parameters! What code are YOU looking at!

"Strengths: Developing scalable code to handle bulk operations" - What! You just told me that my code is inefficient and doesn't conform to governor limits! Now you tell me that my code is wonderfully scalable?

In this final paragraph, I want to give a voice to the feedback process of the Salesforce Architect certification. My co-worker, not I, took this exam, so I'm reporting second-hand information. He paid thousands of dollars and took time off of work to fly to San Francisco to give a presentation before a panel of judges. They gave him a book of backstory and requirements for integrating an external system with Salesforce and allowed ~60 minutes to architect his solution and prepare his solution for presentation. 60 minutes is hardly a practical amount of time to solidly architect a thing of that scale! To add insult to injury, when he received the results via email the following week, which informed him of his failure, they provided no explanation, justification, or areas of improvement. How can he prepare to take this exam again the next time? How can he justify spending thousands of dollars again and not be able to promise improved odds of success? It is quite hard to justify attempting this exam again, no matter how important it is.

For consulting companies like my own, certifications are a necessary way to prove to new and existing clients that we legitimately understand the technology. Therefore, to improve our position relative to competitors, we strongly encouraging our employees to obtain as many Salesforce certifications as possible. I don't mind getting certified, because it makes me a more employable person, and I also personally want to be awesome at my profession. So, even though a certification process is incredible painful, people like me will be forced to continue banging our heads into walls.