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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?

#391

Post by akoshodi »

gzer0 wrote: post #382
akoshodi wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you don't have to pay for renewals of Microsoft role-based certifications. "You can renew your Microsoft Certifications by simply passing a free, unproctored, online renewal assessment on Microsoft Learn, instead of retaking exams. The assessments measure the skills you need to remain up to date in your job role. They’re shorter than the original exams because they focus only on the latest technology changes…

I genuinely did not know this, thanks for the info. Unproctored? Wow, either the exam material must be insanely difficult or they just don't care. Interesting.

No post body was provided.

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

#392

Post by yourapostasy »

bawolff wrote: post #72
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…

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.

I'm enough of a domain expert in certain niches that I've participated in creating certification exams. The reason it can develop into a negative signal: the question banks are rapidly exhausted by the exam dump industry, and for even some esoteric exams 90%+ of the question bank with exactly correct answers are generated within a year of the exam's introduction.

With the popular exams, it is mind-numbingly fast. Think days to weeks. Crowdsourcing / MTurking the question banks is depressingly effective if you sweated over nearly a thousand question bank items for a few months with a few other expensive experts.

Labs in the exams are a way to blunt this, but I think the exam dump industry has probably come up with a way to defeat labs as well by now, because the labs run a fixed set of scenarios with variations in parameters but not the general gist. It's better, but still hackable.

What I've come up with requires discipline by a team documenting the issues they've fixed in the past, but it is so far 100% foolproof. Pick a random relatively self-contained issue your team fixed in the past; this is the most critical step governing the quality of this technique's results. Reproduce the issue in a scratch environment.

Sit down the candidate in front of a workstation set up to their preferences you gathered in advance, with all the tooling they prefer, simplifying your superfluous environment specifics where possible (like logging them into various accounts ahead of time). Set their expectations ahead of time that they will be team / pair troubleshooting for half an hour, that you aren't evaluating whether they find the root cause or not, you're evaluating how well they work with others troubleshooting an issue in some system/language/etc. they claim they are a domain expert in. Dive in.

Without fail, the ones who exam dumped their way to a certification will thrash about. Hard. Most common is they will not know where to even start, deer-in-the-headlights. Even telling the candidate straight out where to start, by using your 20/20 hindsight and artificially picking a starting point 1-2 steps away from the root cause still does not unlock them; jumping to a known good starting point is useful for the experienced candidates who freeze under interview pressure, as they usually unfreeze when given such a big head start from your IRL issue that you ran into for the first time.

You can often get a good gauge of how much and how deeply the candidate worked with the stack they claim competency in by how they navigate around, ask questions, probe for error messages, etc.

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

#393

Post by bigDinosaur »

phpisthebest wrote: post #135
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work experience can be difficult to evaluate, especially since most companies have no incentive to cooperate with the degree granting institution. In addition to the process consuming company resources, there may be sensitive business knowledge they don't want revealed. There's also the issue of turnover making knowledge of an employee's experience with the company very limited. Same for human memory decay or simply…

While I can agree with that, I fail to see how this does not also apply to collegiate based education. Having interviewed several recent graduates the level of knowledge shown is not on par with what I would expect, it seems from my personal experience that college is more of an attendance standard than educational standards, what years ago we would call diploma mills, pay the fee, attend the class, get the degree, s…

This to me simply means we're failing with educational standards. Which, well, we probably are. At the same time, it's not as if professional development is a given with 'years of experience' and companies frequently fail to develop people in any meaningful sense.

There's merit to the idea of awarding a college degree if you can pass all the assessment, without necessarily taking the classes, but that's a different thing again. Ideally, college should be about introducing theory and reasoning which gives a solid understanding of the field in a highly focused manner that an employer almost certainly won't provide. I certainly know people who consider their college experiences extremely rigorous - electrical engineers and so on, so it's absolutely not the case that college can't be rigorous (for any field).

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

#394

Post by Litost »

This is very tangential, but in case it resonates with anyone else.

I was curious to discover recently that to try and bridge the gap between what we should arguably be doing to tackle Climate Change and what we are doing, a group has come up with the term Inner Development Goals to describe a set of abilities that might help with this transition. https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/

Curious if anyone else has come across this, expecially as I've done courses on Sensemaking, Counselling/Coaching, Critical/Systems Thinking and the Shadow (Jung) as mostly just life skills, but interesting to see them grouped together as potentially helpful generally, even if most of them would have to be studied in some depth to turn them into jobs.

The Why (from the homepage):

In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals gave us a comprehensive plan for a sustainable world by 2030. The 17 goals cover a wide range of issues that involve people with different needs, values, and convictions. There is a vision of what needs to happen, but progress along this vision has so far been disappointing. We lack the inner capacity to deal with our increasingly complex environment and challenges. Fortunately, modern research shows that the inner abilities we now all need can be developed. This was the starting point for the 'Inner Development Goals' initiative.

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

#395

Post by agumonkey »

colangelod wrote: post #314

I'm, going to echo a bit of whats in the comments to robcohen's post but the single most productive cert I hold is my pilots license. I do not fly for a living, Im a software engineer (mostly). I hold other certs, some technical, others non technical both work related and non work related by a sizable margin my PPL is the the most productive: Back story: when I started working for my self my first client was a pilot,…

all the points you list about flying, I believe was the norm in the pre-ww2 world.. I think we lost something because our system is so resilient and comfortable, you fear nothing really

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

#397

Post by michaelcampbell »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #241
ElemenoPicuares wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems circuitous. You pre-suppose that the 50 ones you reject are "bad" because of this signal, then support the use of this signal because you rejected them. And then go further to assume the ratio of good:bad of people with this signal is 1-2:50.

I mean, you do you, but it seems that if you were actually interested in the truth you'd have a blind-interview strategy where you interview and judge based solely on the actual interview not knowing about their certificate status a priori.

Note: I don't have a lot of certs (I don't even know that the couple I do have are even up to date, nor on my resume), but this kind of response I see quite often and it feels quite smug.

I find the process of going through the effort to get a cert quite valuable, as it exposes me to aspects of that I probably would have not hit just "spending my free time on work-type projects", which is another red flag for me as an interviewee. I've been a dev my whole career spanning 30+ years, so I get the desire for "fire" and "passion" for the craft, but as soon as someone asks about what I do OUTSIDE of work that could be brought to bear for work stuff, I'm out. I can see what kind of company they are representing.

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

#398

Post by anonymousCTA »

Yes, I work in the Salesforce space and have a bunch of Salesforce certifications including certified technical architect (actually hard to get and rare) and Salesforce certs definitely have value in the job market if you are applying to Salesforce-related positions.

Generally, there are two ways I look at certs.

Skills Development: Having a test to pass is a great extrinsic motivator to go out and learn and have some assessment and external validation that you did learn XYZ. It also removes decision paralysis around what to learn and forces you to focus on a specific topic.

Career benefit: This is 100% dependent on the companies and roles you are applying for. Within the "enterprise" space and large companies certs are generally more valued but it's best to work backwards from the type of companies and roles you want to apply for and see what they are looking for.

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

#399

Post by leaflets2 »

SkittyDog wrote: post #384
ghaff wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have wilderness first responder but I do have wilderness first aid and keep it more or less up to date. I wouldn't try something complicated like a traction splint unless there was really no other option and possibly even then--not sure they even teach it in WFA any longer. But, for the most part having a weekend class to refresh a lot of first aid isn't a bad thing even if you don't practice it all the time,…

Most of the wilderness FA certs have a 3-year expiration. IDK if this was always true, but it's definitely a thing now. If you're using your certification to qualify for a professional or volunteer position, then they usually defer to the expiry period set by the issuer of the certification. In my experience, basically nobody gets any first aid practice, in between re-certifications. And these are perishable skills,…

Interesting how fast memory fades

80h, that's almost one's whole summer vacation

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

#400

Post by _8j50 »

abeyer wrote: post #389
_8j50 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand, I have no problem getting hired but I know how hard it was to even get a call at first because of jerks like the person I was commenting to. I normally would agree that a personal attack isn't warranted but what they said is worthy of one. They are affecting people's lives based on bullshit correlations and instinct? And they work in tech? Really, my remarks should be taken as a response to their d…

> You misunderstand No, I think if your response to getting called out on making personal attacks is to double down on it, I understand quite well, but don't think we'll ever see eye to eye. I wish you the best.

Likewise. My harshness was inappropriate but a personal attack in response to a person punishing people unjustly and bragging about it is warranted. I was not responding to a technical argument but to the intent of the person. Like you called me out I was calling the original commenter out on their treatment of others.
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