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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?

#241

Post by mudrockbestgirl »

ElemenoPicuares wrote: post #176
mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #49

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…

I agree with you in principle, but it's difficult to draw the line when the hiring process needs to be practical. We can't interview everyone and perfect recall isn't necessary. My experience from dozens of interviews has been that many certifications are a rather strong negative signal, at least for our standard software/data engineering roles. I'm sure there are many exceptions to this, but I'll happily miss out on 1-2 good candidates if that means I can filter out 50 bad ones using the same signal.

Of course it's never a binary decision and the complete picture of the resume matters. For example, if someone got a bunch of certs 20 years ago when they started their career that doesn't have any negative impact. But more often, people try to use certs and MOOCs to pad their resume and hope use them to hide the fact that they lack real work experience.

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

#242

Post by MerelyMortal »

hattmall wrote: post #227
dev_tty01 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got irritated with the size of a quote for my heat pump repair, so I got an HVAC certification and did the repair myself. A little time, $300 worth of equipment from Amazon and it is still running great after several years. I needed the HVAC certification to buy the refrigerant. Saved several thousand dollars.

How long did the certification take and how did you go about getting it?

I got the cert 10 years ago (EPA 608, not automotive EPA 609). 60 minutes of studying two different study packets I found online. Found a local test-giver, and called them up to schedule the test.

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

#243

Post by timr »

robcohen wrote: post #188
dorchadas wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at some CEFR ones next!

Sadly I simply am not capable of learning languages. I've tried, really hard. I did 4 years of french, 2 years of spanish, 4 semesters of Arabic, 2 semesters of german, 1 Berlitz tutor session for 3 months in Russian and 3 months of tutoring in Farsi. Most of my grades were AWFUL and I barely qualified for anything. I really tried, but I just don't have the medium/long term memory for language. It also doesn't help t…

FWIW, I felt the same way. Studied French for years, through middle school, high school and college, and never gained any real degree of fluency. Then I moved to Japan and took language classes for 4 hours a day for a year. It worked.

There were people who still raced around me -- I'm not gifted at languages, by any means -- but for the first time in my life I'm actually modestly capable in a second language. I continue to study now, and it's still accumulating, however slowly.

After this experience, I believe that most people can learn a second language, but they don't because the barriers to entry are insanely high. If you really want to learn a language to a conversational level of fluency, you either have to be truly gifted (5% of people) have to want it so much that you'll immerse yourself in it 24/7 (the rest of us).

> I did 4 years of french, 2 years of spanish, 4 semesters of Arabic, 2 semesters of german, 1 Berlitz tutor session for 3 months in Russian and 3 months of tutoring in Farsi

It took me about 3 months of daily immersion in Japanese life (plus the 4 hours of daily school, of course) just to get to a point where my ears could hear words reliably. If you translate this to coursework...it's got to be 1+ years of college-level study.

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

#245

Post by smitty1e »

mmaunder wrote: post #236
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…

Pilot license is great because it gets you into thinking about how we make data driven decisions under pressure. And actual flying solo after you get your license helps because you do a kind of self analysis every time you screw up - even the minor stuff. There’s a lot of study and focus on human factors which is the primary cause of accidents. So it’s great to build self awareness. Congrats on your OSCP - I run a cy…

> Lastly AWS certs are also super practical and very valuable IMO.

And then they roll out new services almost weekly.

Quite a moving target.

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

#246

Post by imwillofficial »

bawolff wrote: post #190
grepfru_it wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Idk, i haven't been in the industry long enough to compare. Also, i work in security (in north america and not gov), maybe other areas are more pro-cert.

I also disagree with your first comment. Large amounts of difficult certs have never been a negative signal and I’ve been doing this for like 20 years. Especially in cyber security where a wide breadth of various knowledge is needed, certs can really help show who has the ”full-stack” so to speak.

That being said, 20+ CompTIA cents isn’t going to move the needle for me.

I say all that to say “it depends on the cert”

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

#248

Post by DethNinja »

syntaxing wrote: post #174

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 think university education or even a masters degree is valuable.

It tells that applicant is capable of at least understanding some high level concepts in terms of logic. However, Software Engineering and Computer Science are quite different than each other.

It is normal that experience overweights a CS education for Software Engineering field.

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

#249

Post by shkkmo »

leeoniya wrote: post #207
robcohen wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i have an open water cert and dive 4-6 times a year. it's fine for just myself, but if you have a higher level cert like rescue, then you may be asked or expected to assist others in emergencies. thankfully, most places are very careful not to take cert cards from unfamiliar faces at face value.

I thank that is a crappy attitude. If I am on a dive and there is a lost diver or some other incident in the area, I want to have the skills to be able to help.

I would note that "asked or expected" is different than "required", so there really is no downside to doing a rescue diver class or a divemaster program. In fact, I highly recommend it and it was a lot of fun.

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