201–210 of 434 posts
How can they tell if the IT consultants are qualified for the work? Certification is one way to ensure they at least meet the minimum requirement but this is not to say the certification implies the IT consultants have the skill sets or knowledge to do the job.
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I've never heard of a CS degree being a negative in any situation outside of someone with a chip on their shoulder about college degrees in general. The person in your example with the degree would still win out in most situations. The person with experience versus a new graduate degree holder is the actual head to head where the non degree holder has a much better chance.
So the person who has proven they can do the work and get promoted in the same career path is less valuable than the CS degree holder (who in this example, did not achieve as much over the same time period) just because they have a degree? This has never been the case in any org promo committee or hiring committee I have been a part of (100s of candidates). I would say in most orgs after 3 years of proven track recor…
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…
Be careful about the bias in single-metric gatekeeping strategies like this. Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of leisure. Certificates are possibly the only foot in the door for folks working multiple jobs with kids, etc. and the government often pays the tuition for low income folks. Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them o…
Not necccesarily. Depending on the cert and field it may make sense to.
The goal of getting the cert should be to learn skills. If you've done that, the piece of paper doesn't matter.
> Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so
The people with all the certs still got interviewed where i worked last, it was just a consistent pattern that they bombed the interview, usually very badly on very basic questions.
Driver's license. Maybe it sounds obvious, but if you don't have a license, you are crippling yourself. Even if you don't have a car, not having a license means you don't even have the option of renting one. Also, is is so "obvious" that if an employer notices that you don't have it, he will wonder why. Are you too stupid to drive? Crippled in some way? Economic problems? Have some criminal history? Alcoholic? You ma…
And the same for degrees, this seems to be very US centric IME. Not having a degree hasn't stopped me getting jobs in top salary brackets based purely on my experience, hell I even have a very odd work history and didn't move into tech till my 30's.
Same for certs, requirements for certs in job ads definitely seem to be a US thing. And for me if I'm reviewing CVs I see certs as a mild redflag as I've come across far, far to many people who have certs but couldn't work their way out of a soggy paper bag.
Serious question, seems like the general sentiment certs are a negative signal (which I don’t agree with but everyone to their own) but where do degrees sit? If certs are a waste of time and people should spend their time “working on something real instead”, wouldn’t this also apply to degrees?
I don’t even bother reading the degree or not part when I am hiring. It’s pretty irrelevant. I doesn’t hurt, but none of my top 5-10 hires over the last decade or so have had one. Anecdotal of course.
As 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…
Might the above be generalized into "The best use of certificates is to reduce uncertainty, for the hirer"? I.e. A SWE with a SWE cert says nothing, because you'd expect them to know it. But a SWE with a DevOps cert says something, versus just claiming knowledge.
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to add to this, if you dont actually use your SCUBA or first responder or pilot skills on a regular basis, those certs are worthless at best, and dangerous at worst.
This is true, but I do try to keep the training up. I'm certainly not doing it every weekend, but I train a minimum of 3-4 times per year for W-EMR. Scuba, honestly so long as you do it once or twice a year you're fine, it's really not terribly hard.
thankfully, most places are very careful not to take cert cards from unfamiliar faces at face value.
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…
Why do you think cert collecting is fun? I can see this being the case just for the fact that certs are usually paired a structured curriculum for learning a new skill. This takes a huge mental burden off and decreases time wasted in deadend exploration.
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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.
Is this recent? I held every cert under the sun in the 2000s and companies GOBBLED ME UP. In the early 2010s I could walk into companies by simply having a VCP cert. I'm sure if I held a K8s or some hashicorp cert, or AWS or Azure certs I would be pulled into any org hiring today. And I put all of my certs on my resume (that I can fit with most recent first). I should also clarify, I only put certs that matter (why p…