[couterSpell]

I find certifications good for really three things:

1.) Having a structured curriculum to learn something new. All my tech skills are self-taught, and it's useful to have a structured learning path.

2.) Validating your skills, especially when you're changing careers. I went from working in call centers to AWS Systems Architect/Linux SysAdmin by virtue of a couple of certs.

3.) Sometimes employers require certain certifications as a condition of employment (or continued employment). This one can be a bit sticky, though. Make sure those certifications make sense for the role. I can't tell you how many job listings I see wanting CompTIA A+. Unless you're applying to work for Geek Squad, you probably don't need an A+ cert (which asks things like 'What is RAM'? 'What is Bluray?').

If you want to get into Linux, getting a couple of certs won't hurt. Red Hat's certs are probably the most well-respected, but of course are centered around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and by extension CentOS).

If you want a good cert path for Debian, go with the Linux Foundation certs. Linux Foundation's certs are less well-known, but also practical exams.

I would avoid LPIC and CompTIA Linux+ certs (NOTE: I am Linux+ and LPIC-1 certified). They are multiple choice exams and really emphasize based on rote memorization of command flags, which really isn't useful to be an actual Linux SysAdmin. Then's the last time you ran into a bzip2 archive? I can't remember the last time I did, but I still remember that tar xjf will unzip one. But, of course, if I did run into a bzip2 in the wild, I can just as easily read the tar man page. Thanks LPIC!

[linuxftw]

In the latest versions of tar, no need to specify compression type if it has a valid extension.

[couterSpell]

Interesting. Then again, that shows another problem with the LPIC exams: They're really out of date.

[k__]

This.

There are some good certs, like AWS and RHCE and some really crappy ones.

Talk to people before doing them to get a feeling if they're worth it.

[scarface74]

I would not call AWS certs “good”, especially not the associate certs. I have the the three associates and two professional ones. The company paid for all except the first.

AWS is so massive, it’s hard to know where to start to get a general overview of it. Studying for and at least doing proof of concepts help with giving you an organized learning path with an end goal in mind.

But, I still don’t think that the certifications necessarily show any level of competence.

I was the dev lead at a mid size company with a small development shop. I was specifically hired to modernize the department and to architect a green field project. Right after I designed the system, they decided to “move to the cloud”. I knew nothing about AWS at the time and neither did they. So they hired a bunch of “certified consultants”.

At the end of the day with the consultants “help”, I ended up setting up an environment just like I would on prem (first mistake) with seven (1 in DEV/QA/UAT and a cluster in production) small VMs for Consul, Nomad, Mongo. I’m already at 21 servers. This doesn’t count two VMs for build servers and 10 or 11 app servers in all.

While this design would have been perfectly acceptable for an on prem setup and looking back I wouldn’t have done anything differently if we were on prem, this was a horrible system for AWS. We could have used managed services for everything above and not had a single VM running except the app servers (today we could have used Fargate to avoid even the app servers but it wasn’t around at the time). We could have even used managed ElasticSearch instead of Mongo since the data stored in Mongo wasn’t the source of truth.

But the “certified consultants” were a bunch of old school infrastructure guys who only knew how to click around on the web console (2nd mistake) and do a “lift and shift”.

I started studying for the AWS Architect Associate just so I could talk intelligently to the consultants and see what type of improvements I could do during phase 2. I had already designed the system to abstract our dependency on Consul, Nomad, and Mongo. I was horrified after discovering all that AWS could have managed for us. I was more horrified that the certified consultants didn’t have a clue. I was most horrified that I passed the certification without ever touching the console and just by watching the videos.

For various reasons, I ended up changing jobs shortly there after, to work for a company that was a pure AWS shop with a new (to the company) manager that wanted to be more “AWS native”.

I became the “AWS guy” even though I’m a developer. Eventually we started interviewing “AWS Architects”. None of the people we were looking for (mid level) had any practical experience. They had just memorized enough from ACloudGuru to pass a multiple choice test.

[k__]

I had the impression the associate certs are much better than most certs out there.

Sure, nothing beats experience, but they are a good place to start your cloud journey :)

[scarface74]

The last set of certs I did was around 2010. They were the six certs required to be a Microsoft Certified Architect (?). I was transistioning from a decade of C bit twiddling with some VB6 on the side to becoming an “Enterprise Developer” and had just gotten a job where they were transitioning to from a VB/C++ backend to .Net.

My thought process for the certifications were the same - a method to get on an organized learning path. But, by the time the company folded two years later, the certs had already expired and I never bothered getting them renewed. I knew it wouldn’t matter when looking for my next job. So they have never appeared on my resume.

Looking back, I don’t think that the AWS Associate certs were any better or worse than the Microsoft certs. But I will keep these up to date.

The second part of the story is that after seeing how much these “certified consultants” were making - I was the dev lead after all - I realized where the money was. Especially since I already had a long development background and some Devops experience I could be much better at AWS consulting than some infrastructure guys.

When I changed companies, I negotiated not to be a team lead. I wanted to be an IC to fill in some technical gaps and get hands on experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant moving companies up on the cloud maturity model”.

[k__]

Sounds nice. Any career tips?

I'm currently getting into the whole serverless space (after I got my aws associate cerst) as a freelance consultant coming from mobile.

[scarface74]

Study for the developer cert and do some hands on work. Again, it’s not because I believe in the importance of “getting the certification”, it’s about the guided learning path.

I was able to get experience through my job, but if that isn’t an option for you, just build something. There are some really good, cheap, thorough Udemy course (no affiliation, not affilliate links):

This course goes over API Gateway, lambda, DynamoDB and a quick overview of how to create a NodeJS Serverless app:

https://www.udemy.com/share/1010qKBUQdeF5TQn4=/

That is the “right way” to create a Serverless API, but if you want to take a regular old Node/Express API and run through lambda you can use the lambda proxy integration:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express

There are similar frameworks for Python/Django and C#/WebAPI

And for the love of all that is holy, learn CloudFormation and don’t create resources manually.

https://www.udemy.com/share/1011JEBUQdeF5TQn4=/

If you have any questions, an email address is in my profile.