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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?

#71
Amateur radio license. The experience is more relevant to my job than any corporate training I've ever done.

Note that "experience" means "everything I've done with the license since getting the license". Don't fall into the "achievement" trap: reading a book so you can pass a multiple choice test teaches you precisely nothing, unless you go out and start to apply the rote memorization.

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

#72

This will not apply to all companies, but for our hiring decisions certs have an adverse effect. If someone puts many certifications on their resume my expectations are lower and I likely won't consider them for interviews. It's a negative signal in my experience. Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff instead of wasting time on a…

I have also seen this. A large number of certs on a resume (more than 4) is the most consistent negative signal i have seen.

I assume part of the reason is that certs are expensive and not well respected, so the only reason you would get them is if you had no other options.

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

#73

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…

Commercial driver and pilot could maybe be better described as licenses. Those have recurring medical requirements, and CDL holders can be picked for drug testing at any time. Strangely most of the flight docs are ignoring the FAA disqualification item of taking a medicine within two years of it being released. At this point, most commercial and military pilots should be grounded for taking the new virus shots. The two year requirement is reasonable to protect flying public from things not found in rushed medical studies, like heart attacks.

MSHA part 48, or others, is useful to be allowed to be unattended on a mine site. The scope and size of some mines, and the operations and equipment, are something to experience. Of course, the mine owner must want you to be there.

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

#75
Imagine choosing between someone with a CS degree vs someone without a CS degree and think which you would prefer to do SWE work for you all else equal.

CS degree every time right?

Now imagine both candidates had the exact same career trajectory. Say 6 YOE, couple years at a FAANG recently, but the non-CS candidate was promoted there etc. which do you prefer now?

Probably the non-CS degree holder. They have proven they can do the work and advance by their self-starter mindset, skill and hustle alone without “appeals to authority”/certification.

Once people have proven they can do the job for real, certification matters less. While some industries make it a box you have to check, tech mostly doesn’t.

Dont wast your time unless you can’t get a foot in the door without a cert.

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

#76

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…

Can personally recommend a Part 107 cert for flying drones. Particularly since you mention your pilots license. It's nice to fly and not worry someone is going to say you're posting might be commercial - because that's ok with the cert. The FAA card is actually pretty nice, and whipping it out can stop some (though not all) of the folks who want to complain about any drone they see.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? The stated purpose of a degree is to educate a person in field of study, the culmination of which is a piece of paper that is suppose to signify to society that you have attained a set level of knowledge in a field of study.

Work experience can convey that same level of knowledge, thus the purpose of an experience based degree would be to signify to society that you have attained a set level of knowledge in a field of study.

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

#78

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…

Just curious, how are you going to get CPA? Don't you need work experience as well as exams for that?

Yeah a CPA isn’t just something you can go out and get like a Microsoft cert.

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

#79
Red Hat, Linux Foundation (k8s mostly), AWS certifications will generally be a positive signal for me (engineering manager, interviewing about 50 people a year, seeing many more CVs).

I've personally gotten a couple and thought they provided good structure to the learning and so I also advise them to engineers we hire if they want to learn k8s and don't know where to start.

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