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

It's not. Fit trumps quantity and quality any time.

I'm not OP, but I also have quite a bouquet of certifications. Why? Mostly because I love to learn and I also love to work towards goals. Also most certifications[1] are not that hard once you've figured out how to deal with scenario based multiple choice questions. It's a low effort way to focus my learning.

When it comes to hiring - and as someone who sat at both sides of the table - any certificate outside of what is expected in your industry does more harm than good.

[1] OSCP is the exception to the rule

It will keep you busy during work slumps but otherwise serves no purpose (at least in FAANGs)

MCSE really helped me.

In the late 90s, 98 I think, I worked for an internet startup that didn’t end up being huge. We were on Novell and a bit if solaris and had just launched a product that used windows nt and server side activex.

I was a college dropout web dev/web master making $50k. They had a hard time hiring devs who knew nt and could design and automate server farms. I learned on the job and did an ok job running it. But they wouldn’t promote me because I was really young and didn’t have a degree.

I went to a Microsoft conference and would buy a study book each day and take the test there. I did 3 exams during the conference and took the other three when I got home and with all 6 certs got my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (with a stamp of bill gates’ signature).

They gave me a raise to $60k (and the college grads went from 50-55). I then got $70k six months later and $80k six months after that as I was the “certified person.”

I always thought it was funny that I did the same job before and after the certs. The Networking cert was really useful and I still remember how to do subnets and dns and dhcp and stuff.

Study the history of obscure German counties to become certifiably in Sayn!

This is also my experience. However, I would say something like Amazon's certifications may be useful if your company has gone all-in on AWS. Amazon (and GCP and Azure) have such a huge variety of offerings, and it's something that Amazon is asserting this person is at least familiar with what these things are and how they fit together, and the trade-offs. On-the-job study is, in general, not going to be good enough to get a comprehensive understanding like that, and a cert course makes a lot of sense.

I suppose if there was a reasonably trusted organization that could give the same cert for "front-end javascript", that would be good too, since there would be great value in surveying at least the major features of the current js landscape. (Probably not practical given the breadth and depth and dynamism of the space, plus the ambiguity of selection. And also, not sure what org would or could do this!)