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Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

interviewing.io

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Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#21

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

berkle4455 wrote: post #7
leeny wrote: post #2

Author/OP here. Just heard an interesting and relevant tidbit from someone who read the post. Apparently a while ago, Google fed resumes of employees into an ML model and correlated several metrics to the success of a specific engineer at Google. There was a lot of interesting data gathered from that but one that stood out was exactly that the number of certifications listed was inversely proportional to the engineer…

Confirming what we’ve suspected for decades. Certs are a waste of time and money. Food for thought: So are degrees.

> Food for thought: So are degrees.

I can see why one would disagree with this if they read "So is an education" so I think it's worth pointing out the difference. Degrees are the thing that are corrupted by Goodhart's law (consider the increase in cost of college tuition; people are so eager to spend more because they're trying to hit a target) and an education can only be faked as well as an individual can bullshit.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#22

Post by Bluestrike2 »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #4
shusaku wrote: post #3

> People often suggest that interviewing.io should create a certification that our users can post on their LinkedIn profile, e.g., something like “Top 10% performer on interviewing.io” Rest of the discussion aside, “we will give you a certificate of being good at interviews” is one of the most absurd grifts I’ve heard in awhile…

If I ever had to interview someone with one of these certificates they would get the most technical, least buzzword friendly interview in human history.

Given how little most people involved in the interview process--on either side--particularly enjoy said process, it seems odd to highlight how much effort you've put into prepping for it.

And it really is like asking for the difficulty to get ratcheted up a level. If I tell you I'm really, really good at interviewing, you're going to take my word for it and adjust your own behavior accordingly. Even if that silly certificate just created an unconscious bias in the mind of your interviewer, with them expecting just a bit more from you, you're a bit worse off.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#23

Post by nemo44x »

Certifications are great if they are meaningful. Most aren’t.

A meaningful certification requires a skills based, hands-on assessment of if a person can do the the thing the certification says they can. It should be proctored and require effort to obtain. A meaningful certification is not an evaluation of knowledge but rather an assessment of skill.

RedHat has great certs that are respected in the industry because it tests if you can do the things it asks. You would hire someone based on this.

Many companies let you take a multiple choice test to “certify” you. Those are worthless and are generally just part of the marketing funnel.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#24

Post by znpy »

leeny wrote: post #2

Author/OP here. Just heard an interesting and relevant tidbit from someone who read the post. Apparently a while ago, Google fed resumes of employees into an ML model and correlated several metrics to the success of a specific engineer at Google. There was a lot of interesting data gathered from that but one that stood out was exactly that the number of certifications listed was inversely proportional to the engineer…

Google and google-level companies are a world of their own and I would apply their findings bit-for-bit.

They have a custom way of doing everything, so certifications for the outside world don’t necessarily apply.

Also, unless such findings are shared in a structured manner (in the form of a research paper or something) then it feels like just a cool story, and I’d be inclined to call bs.

To add my personal anecdotal point of view, getting industry specific certifications (red hat rhcsa, for example) has made me a profoundly better professional, because I had to go over a number of topics and study them thoroughly, way over what the average tutorial covers.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#25

Post by smsm42 »

leeny wrote: post #2

Author/OP here. Just heard an interesting and relevant tidbit from someone who read the post. Apparently a while ago, Google fed resumes of employees into an ML model and correlated several metrics to the success of a specific engineer at Google. There was a lot of interesting data gathered from that but one that stood out was exactly that the number of certifications listed was inversely proportional to the engineer…

Maybe naturally curious people that want to acquire broad and diverse knowledge aren't that interested in climbing the career ladder in Google? Maybe the career ladder in Google is built in a way that encourages narrow focus and singleminded dedication to a single metric only - the career in Google itself? And maybe that's not how everybody is measuring success in life, both professional and broader?

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#26

Post by aynyc »

I've worked in finance, healthcare and defense industry, all those industries do not mark you negative for having IT related certifications. Continue education is a big thing in those industries and generally, degrees and certifications usually get reimbursed.

For me, the key is to match certifications with their work. If I see OCAJP, but zero work experience in that space, or you work on-prem system only, but has AWS Professional, then it's obviously useless.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#27

Post by _8j50 »

leeny wrote: post #2

Author/OP here. Just heard an interesting and relevant tidbit from someone who read the post. Apparently a while ago, Google fed resumes of employees into an ML model and correlated several metrics to the success of a specific engineer at Google. There was a lot of interesting data gathered from that but one that stood out was exactly that the number of certifications listed was inversely proportional to the engineer…

I think you made a critical error of being too generic? What field and what certs? If 90% of certs are junk the your takeaway is wrong because people are posting the wrong certs? What about industry? I didn't even know coders had certs but in infosec for example some certs hold a lot of weight.

I've been on the other side of an interview a few times and I can tell you, I will ask more specific and technical questions if you list a technical cert. I have a few certs but mostly to show my range of skills.

See, interviewers look at one thing I did on a past job or a few things I did because they need to be done and their takeaway is "this guy is more into such and such tech but we need someone who knows something else" but I list the certs to allow them to grill me and find out I actually know that shit.

Now, I have seen lazy-ass managers even on HN that blindly associate having certs with not having skills and to be honestI want nothing to do with such people or orgs that tolerate blatantly lazy managers who can't even delegate technical interviews to their subordinates but instead use gut feelings like this to make decisions. A person spends thousands of dollars on certs and their impression is that person is lame but someone half-starts a bunch of things and is a smooth talker and that's their man.

So, yeah, I guess it helps filter out bad employers just like it helps filter out bad employees. If you refuse to interview someone because they actually have a cert, yeah, that shit needs to be illegal.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#28

Post by jmuguy »

The bar charts in this article are bad. I guess because if they had normal axis you'd realize the differences are insignificant. Also if I'm reading this correctly, the more certs I list - the less I'll hear from recruiters? If so, excellent. I'll do that in addition to adding a weird unicode character to my name.

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#29

Post by forgotpwd16 »

anon84873628 wrote: post #18
hermannj314 wrote: post #10

I took a C# certification on linked in yesterday. It took 10 minutes and was incredibly simple. And the questions were straight to the point C# language questions, pretty easy if you actually work with the language day to day. I liked that it didn't have any questions you'd only know if you happen to be working with the esoteric JSON library du jour, it was pure C# language spec stuff. I'll let you know when I'm stan…

That sounds like the "skill assessment" rather than a certification. I think the former is just a small LinkedIn quiz, and the latter comes from some sort of integration with the cert issuer.

And those "skill assessment" quizzes are meaningless with all questions/answers being a web search away (and not in looking through docs kinda of way but the actual questions/answers).

Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

#30

Post by betaby »

I don't buy the approach. What does it even mean 'Cisco'? CCENT? CCNA? DEVNET? CCIE? Cursera - it varies greatly in quality. Amazon again, Solutions Architect is a memorization exercise, on other side SysOps is more hands on. Yet graphs lumps all those together.
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