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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?

#421

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…

I warmly recommend the UML certifications. They test whether you know UML syntax rules by heart, not whether you can model software decently. It's absolutely useless, great fun!

Oh no.... I think we have very different definitions of fun. I haven't touched UML since uni and I'm glad to keep it that way.

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

#422

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…

What's it take to be a locksmith? In some states, carrying lockpicks is presumptive guilt unless you're a locksmith, but I never figured out whether that's a certification or just a business license or what.

Also very interested in this one. I do some casual locksport but would love to be able to legitimately carry tools and help out friends and colleagues.

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

#423

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…

> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right?

For sure include them if they are relevant to the role or show real commitment to a topic. If you see a string of disperate certs though it's easy to assume the applicant doesn't know what they want to do.

Not saying I would discount someone on this alone but it would raise questions for the interview if they were otherwise qualified.

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah... I'm trying to work out how to fit it in, later this year. I have a 40hr cert that's expiring, later this year, but the stuff I'm really interested in doing requires the full 80hr WFR.

I hope that more of these courses can evolve into a hybrid online model, where you can use distance learning to spread some of the coursework out, ahead of time.

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She wrote: > My experience from dozens of interviews That's not pre-supposing, instead, sounds to me like learning from one's job? > blind-interview strategy I liked that -- how does one make it scale though?

All overgeneralizations start out as conclusions based on observation. Having certificates could not possibly decrease someone’s ability to do a job. Assuming that everybody with certificates is a certain type of person and those types of people make bad workers is clearly not based on rational analysis. Might it generally indicate a some kinds of shortcomings? Maybe. If that merely leads one to investigate, that’s o…

Consider a certificate that, let's say, is pretty useless, just meant learning some software terms by heart for a short while and then forgetting.

If a candidate includes it on his/her CV, this can give the impression that s/he might not have realized that it's useless. Which can make a slightly bad impression

I suppose it depends a bit randomly on who happens to interpret the CV

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All overgeneralizations start out as conclusions based on observation. Having certificates could not possibly decrease someone’s ability to do a job. Assuming that everybody with certificates is a certain type of person and those types of people make bad workers is clearly not based on rational analysis. Might it generally indicate a some kinds of shortcomings? Maybe. If that merely leads one to investigate, that’s o…

Consider a certificate that, let's say, is pretty useless, just meant learning some software terms by heart for a short while and then forgetting. If a candidate includes it on his/her CV, this can give the impression that s/he might not have realized that it's useless. Which can make a slightly bad impression I suppose it depends a bit randomly on who happens to interpret the CV

You can't just bolt on other theoretical negative factors to change the usefulness of the analysis itself. This conversation is not about bad or irrelevant certificates— it's about certificates in general.

The candidate included them on their resume for you to evaluate, so evaluate them. Nobody's arguing that candidates with only free LinkedIn certs and nothing else should be given equal consideration to those with formal education.

The question is whether or not people with any certificates can ethically be dismissed out-of-hand because they list certificates on their resume. The answer is still no.

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

#427

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…

> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? For sure include them if they are relevant to the role or show real commitment to a topic. If you see a string of disperate certs though it's easy to assume the applicant doesn't know what they want to do. Not saying I would discount someone on this alone but it would raise questions for the interview i…

And that's totally fine. We all have our own heuristics for determining what we like in a candidate, but we need to be very, very critical of those measures and make sure they aren't masking other less justifiable gut instinct decisions. Bias is generally subconscious— If it really was as cut-and-dried as we like to think, then it wouldn't be a gut feeling metric at all— we'd be able to back up our reasoning with hard facts. As rational as they might seem, 'gut feeling' criteria almost universally favor people we're comfortable with rather than the most qualified candidate. That's a real problem for folks who aren't part of the dominant culture of the industry: Millenial to Gen-X straight white and asian guys.

If a qualified candidate only having certificate credentials merely prompts further investigation, then great. However, it's quite often the tipping point between round-filing a good candidate and calling another one in for an interview. While it might seem innocuous on a micro level, on a macro level this affects big swaths of the population.

In the 2005 Study Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...), they responded to 1300 job ads with 5000 equally-weighted resumes with randomly assigned names which were either stereotypically white, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, or stereotypically black, like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Resumes with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback. Fifty percent! The likelihood of 1300 randomly chosen job ads being run by the KKK is pretty low. Most, if not all of them were probably letting "gut instinct" criteria swing their judgement.

If you had a video game where the sole task was getting a job, one race having a built-in buff where the callback was 50% greater without being balanced somewhere else would be insanely unfair. Not only is it not balanced, but we're literally only talking about these folks names— never mind their appearance, manner of speaking, cultural references, etc.

We all like to think of ourselves as good people but that's not enough to stop this. We need to deliberately interrogate our MO, here.

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

#428
I recently spent the $700 to become a Certified ScrumMaster. This is within the past month, so any evaluation on how much it has helped my career is premature, but being that I've found myself to be the accidental ScrumMaster at work, taking the course to learn what the role is supposed to be seemed worthwhile. It has given me some credibility with management that I didn't have before, although the long term effects are as of yet unknown. It was an interesting two day class and a 50 question multiple choice exam. I had the privilege of taking the course with Chet Hendrickson, one of the originators of Extreme Programming (XP) and a contributor to some of the books written on Agile. I think the knowledge was worth acquiring and I actually enjoyed the course, which is more often not the case.

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

#429
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also dropped out of both high school and MIT undergraduate An MIT degree seems like it would actually be helpful in one's career. They seem to be pretty good in terms of engineering courses, faculty and student body. Did you skip directly to a graduate program?

No, I dropped out to do a startup, partially because I couldn't afford to pay for my tuition (I was ineligible for loans because my parents wouldn't sign/provide info, and MIT offered zero financial aid.)

Haha, I should have guessed it would be a startup. ;-) MIT offered zero financial aid? That's surprising.

I assume MIT's financial status is such that if they wanted to they could offer need-blind admissions and full financial aid packages without student loans the way many schools (e.g. almost all of the Ivy League) have. (Though I'm not sure whether they've gotten rid of parental loans, which are kind of terrible as well.)

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a certificate that, let's say, is pretty useless, just meant learning some software terms by heart for a short while and then forgetting. If a candidate includes it on his/her CV, this can give the impression that s/he might not have realized that it's useless. Which can make a slightly bad impression I suppose it depends a bit randomly on who happens to interpret the CV

You can't just bolt on other theoretical negative factors to change the usefulness of the analysis itself. This conversation is not about bad or irrelevant certificates— it's about certificates in general. The candidate included them on their resume for you to evaluate, so evaluate them. Nobody's arguing that candidates with only free LinkedIn certs and nothing else should be given equal consideration to those with f…

I wasn't writing about me -- I personally I wouldn't dismiss anyone because of certs, in fact I don't care that much about people's resumes at all.

However if I was looking for a job, I'd be a bit careful with including what to me seemed like "unimportant" certs, for the reason I mentioned

> The question is whether or not people with any certificates can ethically be dismissed

To me, the question was rather if there's in practice a risk that it happens, (un)ethical or not

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