Are technical certifications of any worth?

In my experience, there are three kinds of people who get certified:

1) The highly competent who happened to be bored an afternoon and got one as a joke, or just to check how easy it was to get one, or as a result of a stupid bet. These people usually never mention their certifications on their resumes.

2) The competent people who were forced by their company to get certified for whatever reason. If you ask them they'll tell you, and it might be on their resumes, but as a footnote.

3) Finally, the incompetent people, who think the certifications are actually worth anything. They'll proudly highlight what they got, thinking other people will be impressed. When hiring, this is obviously a strong negative marker.

You can see from the answers in this thread that certifications, if worthy of anything at all, are deeply looked down upon by the same kind of people who read HN. And more often than not, these are the kind of people you want to be working with/for.

Generally, certifications, however, are appreciated by the stereotype of the HR department and non-technical managers of large organizations. If you have a certification from a brand name stating that you know how to use a particular technology, then no one is going to be blame for hiring you, even if it doesn't work out. That's the stereotype and unfortunately, it is far from uncommon.

You were spot on that people "can just clear this certification program just by preparing through previous question dumps. Does this do any good to anyone", but that's a broader problem relative to standardized test. To a large extent the same could be said about your degree.

Finally, as mentioned globally in the comments, experience is far more interesting than certifications. However, I may add that, for programmers, nothing, absolutely nothing, beats a code portfolio.

I'm about to say negative things. I don't like saying negative things, particularly because someone could misread them as having personal animus behind them, which I don't have.

There's a particular type of college student who is not ready to work in a real job. They believe themselves incapable of working in real jobs, they signal this incapability, and employers generally hate working with them because they're needy and unprofessional. They don't thrive unless they have someone telling them "Do X then Y then Z" and then providing constant positive feedback ("100 points for X!"), which is a teacher-student relationship, not an employer-employee relationship.

Someone getting a certification is signaling a desire to continue being a student. Someone desiring to be an employee signals this desire by putting down the books and getting a job.

Certification is a form of social proof, and a shortcut to find people who might be qualified in some industries.

They are worth it if your 'customer' (employer, actual customer, other) cares. But, thinking about acquiring social proof rather than certifications leads to a more interesting set of ideas.

For eg., you can acquire Salesforce certification for their platform or you can build a Salesforce app that customers use and rate highly. In turn, you would use the app to generate revenue or give it away for free so you can get multi million consulting contracts(slight exaggeration).

If you are looking to be cool with the tech crowd, no they are never worth it. If you want to provide a service to customers, social proof matters.

I consider the mid or high level Cisco certifications to be meaningful (I don't have one yet, and wouldn't require one, but most CCIEs I've met have been pretty good at networking.).

CISSP, CompTIA, A+ seem to be inversely correlated with competence, although government and some employers require them (hence, I have CISSP). The CISA is pretty much just for tech auditors (which is why I have one), and only seems correlated with "able to be corporate and write reports" vs tech skills.

The Glock Armorer's cert is superior in its domain to any short tech cert.