PRINCE2 certification certainly made me a better PM.
Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
371–380 of 434 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#372I'm generally not a big fan of security certs, especially for mid career or later (and a lot of people I know got involved well before certificates were a thing; they might have gotten certificates early on had they entered the industry later). However, DOD (8570/8140), some specific regulations, and some specific clients sometimes require them. I also dropped out of both high school and MIT undergraduate so having a…
> 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?
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#373In the software development space, we tended to shy away from hiring certs, eg MCSD, etc. They proved to be a very poor substitute for experience. We had far better results in the IT space with certs like Cisco, and similar certs.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#374In the software development space, we tended to shy away from hiring certs, eg MCSD, etc. They proved to be a very poor substitute for experience. We had far better results in the IT space with certs like Cisco, and similar certs.
Even supplemental, they give a bad vibe. They're just so unusual to see on a developer's resume, and it's easy to conflate that with the bad candidates who only have certificates on their resume.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#375The only document that really ever had a significant benefit for me was my DD-214 from the military. Being prior military helped me get my foot in the door to the tech industry. It is still helping me today in my retirement. I needed that to get "Veteran" on my drivers license and I get a 10% discount and most of the local stores.
The certifications from training classes while in tech were not useful for my career but did come in handy when a few customers required {n} percentage of people to be "certified in ..." but those were very specific and obscure use cases.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#376In the security field, CISSP is worth it. Many federal and private sector jobs require it, or won’t take you seriously without the credential.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#377I'm gonna second the OSCP or any Offensive Security major cert. The testing is both intense and IS the actual job, when it comes to hiring security professionals - assessors, pen testers, CSIRT / Hunt folks, etc. It verified both the technical and report writing skills, which is essential to the job.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#378This 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 interested in an informed discussion of a comparison of the merits of the differing tech certs, not so much talking about scuba, finance, or truck driving.
How does the quality and value of, say, CompTIA, Cisco, AWS, OSCP, K8s, Linux+ and other certs compare with each other?
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#379Language certifications. Foreign universities usually ask for them. Also, it always looks good on your resume. Not to mention, language is a great way of connecting with people even if you are not of the same ethnicity
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#380Going to go out on a limb here, but Eagle Scout.
Yeah, I know most of the people reading this can't go back and get one because you can only do it if you're a kid. And yeah, it's not really a certification, but I thought I'd put it in as something tangential.
Still, some of the best men I've worked with seem to have it more than not [0]. And when they see it on a resume, it's an instant 'eyes-light-up' effect. The people that are then hired are really good all in all. Just one okay-ish person that was an Eagle Scout out of about 15-ish that I can remember.
[0] It's been exclusively male for my career, but now women can get it too. So be on the look out for both sexes.