Is certification a good thing for the LabVIEW community?

I gave a talk at NI Week '08 titled "From Spaghetti Code to State Machines: One Man's Journey through the Certification Process" about the positive effect certification has had on my LabVIEW programming ability and style. The talk was on Tuesday and it generated some interesting and sometimes heated conversations the rest of the week. People would come up to me, tell me they liked my talk, and would proceed to give me their opinions on the topic. It was great, I didn't have to solicit people's opinions, they just came up to me and started talking. The responses tended to follow a bipolar distribution. People said either "That was my story you told!" or "Certification sucks, it's just a way for NI to milk their user base for more money!".

I hope to discuss these responses more fully in future posts, but for now I've put a poll on the sidebar of this blog asking a very simple question. Is certification a good thing for the LabVIEW community? This is not a referendum on NI's current implementation of the certification process. I'll save that for future polls. This is simply a thumbs up, thumbs down vote on certification in general. Do we need it? Is it beneficial?

This is an important question to us as a community. Certification is a major part of how the LabVIEW community relates to National Instruments. If certification is a bad idea, we should tell NI to scrap it. If it is a good idea, we should be part of the process of helping NI improve it. Which is it going to be?