Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

For recreational scuba this is misleading. The cert is proof of going through training at some point, which differentiates you from someone who has never been breathing under water, cleared your mask and reg, and knows basic buoyancy control. These skills are not intuitive so the main thing is exposure, which the cert proves to a large extent.

Dive shops with more advanced dives ask for total and recent experience as well, and sometimes require you to do a refresher or dive with them once before they take you on the advanced dives (deep, night, high current, overhead obstacles etc). The OW cert is a big contributing factor, but it's not the only data point.

That said most other recreational certs are useless and just a money grab, even including advanced, imo. Shops generally rate OW+30 recent dives higher than OW+AOW, and rightly so.

> Are you too stupid to drive? Crippled in some way? Economic problems? Have some criminal history? Alcoholic?

I recently got my driver’s license, first one, at an age far far above the norm for America, even if you factor in New York.

In a long and so far pretty successful career in tech, this has come up exactly once in a professional context, and it was my fault because I was asking about the lack of public transit options during an interview. CEO asked “why don’t you just get a license?”

My colleagues usually find out sooner or later that I don’t (didn’t) drive, because I’m very social. Most people are fascinated by the possibility. At the very least it’s a conversation starter.

I regret not getting the license sooner, but the kind of ignorant and malicious questions listed above have never, ever featured in my unusually long pre-DL experience.

Form observation an MBA gets you into higher paying work.

Nice try, manager ;)

We work on side projects because we __like__ it. Seeing side projects through the lense of "value" is naive in my opinion. Yes, obviously if the side project has actual users than that's a plus. But companies like seeing side projects because it __does__ show that the candidate really likes what they do for a living. Now whether the company is purposefully using that to expect people to work 60 hours a week is a different discussion. And while I'll probably ruffle some feathers by saying this, I'll say it; software is a sport. Very much like a sport, if you stop doing it then you'll get fat and lose your touch. People that work on side projects are constantly honing their craft and because of that they tend to be the best athletes.

If I owned a baseball team, I sure as hell want the best. And in my humble opinion, the best are usually __always__ working on getting better at the game. AKA working on side projects ;)

EDIT:Just want to clarify; it is WRONG of a company to expect people to work 60 hours a week. Just so we are in the same page. I am NOT condoning that.

Engineering degree or and science based degree. Learn critical thinking.

Directly IT related - Novell used to offer what they described as "practicum" exams for their SLES (Linux) offerings. These were web based and you literally did sysadmin stuff on VMs - configure users, set up a web server, SAMBA, DNS etc and then the system would mark you. Beats the crap out of memory tests like the old MCSEs and the VMWARE VCP bollocks. I recall quicky getting Apache to serve /usr/share/documentation to help me out.

Nowadays I employ people and I am not predisposed to any form of excitement about memory test type exams and qualis on CVs (Resumes). I may sit you down in front of something bloody expensive and complicated and ask you do do something with it ...