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Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
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Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#2Haven’t done any myself but when I hire people I generally treat them as a net positive for people early in their career because it gives them exposure to concepts that are relevant, but for more senior people it wouldn’t matter at our company.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#3Early in my career I stacked up certs. I’d usually get ones that were relevant to projects I was working on. I’d find sometimes (again earlier in my career) that I needed a combination of structured learning to complement concepts in large projects I was working on at the time.
This led to more responsibility and more pay but it took a lot of my own time. As I’m senior in my career now I sometimes wonder if it was worth it as a trade off for all of the certifications I earned.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#4Education, job experience, provable skill set.
Software development and certificates seems like it's not a perfect fit.
If it were for an industry that is heavily regulated, certificates make a lot of sense.
They're like small exams in highly domain-specific knowledge.
Having ISO/IEC 27001, for example, for legal/compliance reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#5As a hiring manager, I treat AWS certification (professional especially) as relatively a good heuristic. It does not replace hands-on experience of course, but it has good correlation with good hands-on ability.
Another one that will catch my eye is any Kubernetes certification.
Both are great additions to experience, the certification itself has much less value standalone, but it might be the edge that will help someone get that entry level job.
(These are common for DevOps engineers, but a SWE with the above will have an edge in my book)
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#6Never. I had a number of top certificates in the past, nobody ever asked about it even if they were very relevant to the jobs I had. The only ones ever useful were the Cisco network certifications that were required for some jobs, but even these became almost irelevant in the past 10 years.
I see these days lots of certifications on LinkedIn. For the people that I know well, it is a mystery how they get it because it is usually the weakest in the team that gets certified, while the best people never do it.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#7I do a lot of hiring and I dont particularly value them, except for near entry level jobs. Certifications rarely test real skills or indicate the ability to actually do a job. For low seniority roles they indicate dedication at least.
Where they are useful is as a structured learning syllabus for entry level knowledge of a topic. If you know nothing about a topic but want to get into it, starting with a cert is a way to get the vocabulary and build a base to actually learn it from.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#8As a hiring manager, I treat AWS certification (professional especially) as relatively a good heuristic. It does not replace hands-on experience of course, but it has good correlation with good hands-on ability. Another one that will catch my eye is any Kubernetes certification. Both are great additions to experience, the certification itself has much less value standalone, but it might be the edge that will help som…
This doesn't answer the question by OP at all. You just listed two recent trendy certs.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#9Lack 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.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#10Ive heard that hard security certs are somewhat respected, but i dont have experience to confirm/deny it