Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by bigDinosaur » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #41

protomyth wrote: post #9

Lack of a Masters pretty much ended my ability to teach some intro programming courses according to the accreditation board. So, the answer to the question in reverse. Damn shame given some future plans, but experience isn't the equivalent.

Outside of money I have never seen a logical explanation for why we has a society have not created a purely experienced based "degree", something that if you have say 6 years experience in a field of Computer Science, and can demonstrate either with testing or work product the same level of knowledge one would gain from a 4 year degree program just issue the degree. Even with money, let me pay $10-20,000 , take a tes…

What would be the actual value of a 'degree' here as opposed to just the work experience? This sounds as much a reason to just ignore the idea of degrees as being uniquely meaningful which is...probably fine. But, degrees and work experience are not (or should not) be the same thing.

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

#52

Post by oneplane » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

There is no singular "get this proof and you'll be better off for it". You can get a cert that says you are the best at a thing in the world but without any applied experience it'll be hard to be valuable. The same goes for having a lot of experience 'doing stuff' but no common vocabulary or standards making collaboration really hard.

If you have long-term experience and a base 'proof' of knowing how to work together, you have a solid foundation and everything else is just time and putting in the work (unless you want to get into some old boys network which isn't based on skills but on some form of heritage, be it family or a specific institute to attend).

If you get some fundaments for compsci at any college and then work for 5 years going from application administration to system administration to cloud native development you'll have the same solid impression as starting at the helpdesk, getting an AWS cert and working your way up from junior AWS engineer to medior AWS engineer.

Keep in mind that none of this gets you FAANG level work because they get a large enough pool of applicants where they can just filter anyone who doesn't have a combination of high grades and university or lots of experience in a highly specialised field.

Besides that, like others wrote: "advertising" what certs you have collected is like advertising what Pokemon you collected.

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

#53

Post by an9n » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

In certain sectors in the UK e.g. defence they absolutely love certs.

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

#54

Post by W0lf » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

pilsetnieks wrote: post #47

devoutsalsa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Study almond growing to become certifiably nuts.

Though almonds are technically seeds, not nuts.

Well, actually… :-)

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

#55

Post by rdl » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

I'm generally not a big fan of security certs, especially for mid career or later (and a lot of people I know got involved well before certificates were a thing; they might have gotten certificates early on had they entered the industry later). However, DOD (8570/8140), some specific regulations, and some specific clients sometimes require them. I also dropped out of both high school and MIT undergraduate so having at least some cert is sometimes helpful for forms.

Assuming you have the experience and a reasonable level of knowledge, CISA and CISM are pretty easy to maintain. CISSP is arguably worth it too but I let mine lapse due to annoying renewal requirements and some politics in the org.

Having one or more of these can be really handy -- sometimes you have a client who requires it (perhaps because they've copied someone else's requirements), sometimes there is a project you're tangentially aware of with an audit requirement, etc.

Technically they're nothing special. The Offensive Security stuff is probably the best for technical knowledge in their domain.

(I also do a bunch of med, shooting, driving, armorer, etc. classes; it's especially interesting seeing how adult education/instructional design/etc. work in those areas, independent of the actual subject areas taught. "Training" vs. "education" in a lot of cases, etc.)

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

#56

Post by vincentleeuwen » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

I am CTO of a startup (and use to be freelance dev). I once did the Introduction into Machine Learning course on Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning).

Although I would agree with most opinions here that that does not make me into a data scientist by any meanse, I do really like that I have a good "helicopter view" of ML. This is still super benificial in my role today, as I know which kind of statistical models apply to certain kind of problems. This enables me to find the right people for the right solution with much more ease.

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

#57

Post by Jenz » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

pilsetnieks wrote: post #47

devoutsalsa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Study almond growing to become certifiably nuts.

Though almonds are technically seeds, not nuts.

A rare actually tasteful “technically…,” thank you.

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

#58

Post by itsbalamurali » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

Not really! but collecting them was fun:

https://www.credly.com/users/balamurali-pandranki/badges https://www.credential.net/cdcfc3a1-b8c6-4b79-8efb-120b61927...

CEH is missing in there.

It was fun but none gives a F as long as you get things done.

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

#59

Post by lupire » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:50 PM UTC

robcohen wrote: post #11

I collect a lot of certs for fun, but most have not been helpful. I still like to collect them anyway. I think OSCP was the most legitimately useful in tech https://www.offensive-security.com/pwk-oscp/ PMP has been useful to take on Project Manager roles, but really PrM roles aren't all that exciting to begin with. Still helps when you want to run your own projects. I'm currently studying to be a certified parliament…

> certified parliamentarian

Is the specific parliament you want to work in?

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

#60

Post by mellosouls » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

There's quite a few comments already about the dubious worth of certificates but that's an assumption pretty clearly implied in the OP.

It would be useful to focus on the question as intended otherwise we are just going to see the same "certificates meh" noise that most of us already know.