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

Far too many people are needing a security qualification to be taken seriously by senior management.

I'm very clear when I say senior management because not everything has to have +TLS. But when your management get the speak from the "security certified" guy they stop listening to you and delegate.

With that in mind SANS. And I feel sorry for saying most of it. When your a seasoned Unix admin you shouldn't need a Windows wireshark certification about diamond team picking up your internal site traffic containing open secrets, but management thinks so...

Depends on the stage of your career.

Back in the early 2000s when I was fresh out of university I did the Sun Certified Java Developer course. It made me stand out of the vast number of other graduates looking to get into the industry. I landed an awesome job straight away.

My advice would be to get 1 or 2 meaningful ones if you really want them. Avoid littering your resume with a bunch of certificates, since that adds a negative bias I find.

Is this some American car culture thing? Never heard someone mentioning it as an issue. If anything, in my circles owning a car is frowned upon.

My number one tip for anybody interested in this would be to contact the Pyrotechnics Guild International any locate in-state guilds that can take you under their wing and help you along the way. There are two in my state and they’ve both been remarkably receptive and helpful.

I get what you're saying and I think this is true for a lot of people, but hear me out.

I actually rarely read too deeply into the CV except as a source for some talking points. I have a phenomenal recruitment team so I rarely need to "guess" on a candidate from a CV (truly, they are exceptional and they really get what my team is looking for and our candidates love them also cause the recruiters took a lot of time to learn enough to talk competently about our tech scope) If my recruiters pass me a candidate, the candidate is at least good enough to bullshit fairly competently.

We structure our interviews to be very conversational -- the same points are always hit and we have a loose grading structure, but mostly the goal is to get the candidates to talk about problems and explain their thoughts really well. I do feel bad, because I can tell some put a ton of effort into their CV, but I rarely pay that much attention to it besides ctrl+f for some subjects I want to talk about or looking for a few keywords outside of our core competencies just to see how they talk about these edge cases.

Passion is good, but for me, passion shines through during the interview and the conversation and how they love to talk about what they work on. Even with the most nervous candidates, we've taken a lot of time to practice just being approachable and interested, which helps even the shyest candidates really open up. I know I had one candidate pretty recently where they were quite shy (and also interviewing in a second language, not their primary so lots of stress there). It took a little bit, but by the end of the interview, they were blushing red with pride and smiling uncontrollably with how proud of themselves they were for answering really tough questions and scenarios we had for them. (and they knocked it out of the park for a DevOps position, I don't think I've been so happy with a candidate in awhile)

I wish we got this for every candidate; their passion gets tapped and just suddenly I see someone gushing about their favorite topic.