you can pry my Andrew Ng Coursera ML cert from my cold dead hands
Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
11–20 of 84 posts
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#12Author/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 that’s largely because people who get certificates often do so because they didn’t have formal (or close to formal, e.g. highly motivated dropouts) education in the field they are getting a certificate. (also - job churn, and/or they may be slightly less autodidactic)
from my experiencing interviewing, people get and list certificates not for that reason but because they have less awareness that those certificate are considered BS and therefore listing them indicates how you don't recognize BS.
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#13When you plot graphs that present a 4% point difference as a visual 100% or 200% difference because your axis starts at 50 and ends at 58, I automatically don’t read what you have to say.
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#14Author/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.
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Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#15Author/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 that’s largely because people who get certificates often do so because they didn’t have formal (or close to formal, e.g. highly motivated dropouts) education in the field they are getting a certificate. (also - job churn, and/or they may be slightly less autodidactic)
I'm a "highly-motivated dropout" and I accumulated a few certs in a previous life because my employer paid for it and it was for areas in which I already had some knowledge (mid-level CompTIA stuff, Agile, AWS). I'd typically buy the book, read through it in week or two and highlight it to shore up my weaknesses, take notes, then do the test. I never once failed via this method. As it turns out, however, this is a very niche approach. The vast majority of my peers looking to get such certs would go to a "bootcamp" and spend months memorizing test banks compiled by third parties.
There's a gulf of difference between somebody that gets a cert to validate/enhance their knowledge and somebody that does so to get a piece of paper. The amount of people that fall into the latter category seems to dwarf those in the former as an industry has been built around prepping under-experienced people for these certifications in the hopes of advancing their career.
This is all to say that the sentiment expressed in this article is unfortunately largely correct. I've since let all of mine lapse because the employers I now work for value demonstrable technical acumen over something that somebody likely bulldozed their way through four years ago and requires $200 annually to renew.
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#16> 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.
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Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#17Interesting take. Post title should be more precise, the article focuses on engineers’ roles.
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#18I 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.
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s largely because people who get certificates often do so because they didn’t have formal (or close to formal, e.g. highly motivated dropouts) education in the field they are getting a certificate. (also - job churn, and/or they may be slightly less autodidactic)
Exactly! You get certifications to prove you can do a job (in theory); the most successful people never have to prove they can do a job. Go look at all of Carmack's certifications, or Torvalds, etc.
except, bullying people over perceived "lack of" whatever is first stop for abusive job shops. The problems of "the most successful people" are not the problems of a million+ twenty-somethings trying to work for a living. Please recall that in some nations right now, the majority of the population is under 25. Literate people are being setup to be cheap IT labor right now, fair or not.
Re: Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters
#20I laugh at certifications, people that accumulate certifications, am skeptical of adjacent industries that actually seem to respect certifications (IT, Cybersecurity) and still sort of laugh at them because actual programmers and hackers defeat the "best practices" all the time while having no certifications. I'm also skeptical of bootcamps the same way.
I don't have a solution to gatekeeping, I'm not saying "you need a university degree", because you don't.
My feelings do match the model shown in the article.