[peterkelly]

I think industry certifications are a mostly pointless idea. If I'm looking at learning something, my criteria is "will this information still be relevant 10 years from now?" If the answer is no, I either don't bother with it, or I invest the minimum necessary effort to learn what I need to do to solve the problem at hand.

Technologies that certifications focus on tend to have a limited lifespan. I place far more value on more general, conceptual knowledge that will be applicable to a multitude of implementations, mixed with some practical hands-on stuff. I've gotten far more out of learning about things like relational databases, compilers, multi-threaded and message passing programming, distributed systems, and experience with a range of different programming paradigms than I believe could ever be gained from certifications. Focusing on generic topics like this is going to be far more valuable to your career in the long run.

If I see a company specifically looking for someone with a certification or experience with a particular library/framework, I take that as a sign that they don't fully appreciate the value that a well-rounded engineer can bring to the table. Furthermore, certifications have the effect of tying your advertised skill set to a specific vendor's products, and expect you to keep up to date every three years or so as they change the specifics of their training and certification requirements.

My company, a contracting firm, recently ran some AWS training sessions and offered to cover the costs of the exams for employee who wanted to do them. I went along to a couple of sessions but ultimately concluded it wasn't a good use of my time, relative to other things I could be doing to advance my career. While I'm fortunate to mostly work for clients who understand that, I wish there were a wider appreciation of general knowledge rather than people investing themselves so heavily into skills that have a short lifespan and are tied so heavily to specific vendors and the current flavor of the month.

[syshum]

I both agree and disagree with your post... Mainly because it just a big long False dilemma where you put General knowledge over specific knowledge believing that one has to choose

I think people should have a good conceptual knowledge, a base line of general knowledge of technology, that however does not preclude one from gaining vendor specific knowledge.

Your coming at this from a development standpoint, I am coming from ops but if I have legacy environment critical to my business I need people that are experts in that environment. You may have all the best "general theory" around how Virtual Machines work, how iscsi works, etc but if I have an error on VMWare ESXI that causes production lose I need a person that has DEEP understanding of VMWare not someone that understand the theory of things as I do not have time for you to open a ticket to get vendor support, I need it fixed now not 5 hours from now after vmware blames the storage vendor and the storage vendor blames vmware

[ocdtrekkie]

Considering most Microsoft Windows Server features covered have been around since Windows XP, I’d argue most Windows certs meet your criteria.

I’d call my Cisco certs, combined with the community college courses that aligned with them, the most effective education process in my life. It directly impacted my job, immediately. Even aside from the fact that in the MSP business, certs are super marketable.

[ZephyrP]

I think Cisco certifications, even the CCNA, are suspended from scrutiny by many, even in disciplines famous for their cert-skepticism like infosec.

There exist other prestigious certifications, but they generally lack the reputation for seriousness that Cisco is credited with, even crystallizing into a semi-mythological reputation for playing unfair on behalf of recipients with refusals to license IOS ELX and even lucrative hardware sales to organizations which don't have CCIE on staff.

[ocdtrekkie]

From my understanding, Microsoft certs can be similarly challenging. And from an IT industry standpoint, there's similar value in terms of partnership: Microsoft partner levels depend on having Microsoft-certified professionals.

It will be interesting to see what they do here, for instance, the Datacenter competency for Microsoft Gold partners requires MCSA: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/membership/datacenter-co...

Right now, the document just says "we're working on something to replace these".

[anonsivalley652]

Lol. Yeap, that's about it. Most certs are mostly a scam to let non-technical hiring managers and HR people give themselves some virtue-signaling brownie points.

I was an AWS Sr. Systems Engineer consultant with a preferred vendor working on-prem for Fortune 200's. No certifications other than a BS CS/EE, was an undergrad (unusual) security researcher at a top lab, VMware and the intro MCSA exam; but no A+, CCIE, ITIL, PMP and no MCSE.

One of the top *nix/Windows sr. sysadmins for the US MIL's DMDC has only VMware certs.

Security researchers and offensive security folks: few, if any, certs beyond (usually) university.

[blm]

I dont think you understand what it is like in some job markets. Once you are in an industry you might be able to sustain a career without certifications but how is someone supposed to break into an area when people only hire candidates with "experience" or certifications? Certifications were proof that you got off your ass and learnt and passed an exam. People that hire do not trust resumes anymore because candidates can put anything in a resume to make them sound good. You could construct a lab at home and write about your learning activities but in my experience no one trust such "evidence" since people can just copy and paste other peoples work.

[paranoidrobot]

> candidates can put anything in a resume to make them sound good

This is true.

However it's not like Certification is a good measure for competency or skill, either.

A lot of the big name certs have major issues with either being passable via brain-dumps, and/or they test for bad and outdated practices.

Certifications are unfortunately a contraindication to competency and skill.

[freedomben]

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and hold several certifications, so I have a clear conflict of interest here

I agree with your analysis there regarding outdated and passable via brain-dumps, which is why I both respect and pursue Red Hat certs (before I went to work there). They are damn hard and there's no way to pass them unless you have practiced your ass off. The cert transcripts also specify exactly which version of the tech you took your exam on (e.g. RHEL 7 or Ansible v2.7), so an employer can see if your skills are outdated. IME they are well respected in the industry.

No test or cert if perfect of course, but they're not all equal IMHO.

[anonsivalley652]

Some certs like A+ are a game to get the candidate to memorize useless, obscure trivia that is found in someone's test prep materials.

The exploitative training/testing racket is all about creating a subscription-like dependency with planned obsolescence to get steady, easy money for more testing and more exams.

Thank the various gods for, back in the day: TestKing.

Good certifications which can be used in certain safety-critical tech jobs include the US state-by-state Professional Engineer license with a brutal and comprehensive exam process plus required work experience.

In general, better exams are free-form responses and/or a panel interview (if they still do that) like CCIE.

[anonsivalley652]

Yup.

My boss had an MCSE but could only operate a Windows desktop as a power user and install Windows (server). He got this cert because of the "bootcamp" where they only taught to the tests and then they took the tests until they passed them.

Meanwhile, I was deploying GPOs and scripting remote cleanups of Blaster using PsExec... zero certs and no degree.

A+ is the mark of the beast and the coming of the second-stringer.

[anonsivalley652]

Get an A+ certification and see how far you get. :)

I could be wrong, but you come across to me on the negative-side, like cognitive distortions or inexperience. "Some job markets" being what specifically? Game dev, for example, the most sure path to that is more general experience before and willingness to work as an unpaid intern/code janitor prior to getting a paid position.

"How": That's your responsibility to use your imagination to figure out. No one else can or should think for you or do what you need to do because then you won't internalize independence or gain self-confidence to be more capable.

I've been a hiring manager on occasion. Resumes are an advertisement that must be proven fact-checking the candidate that the can demonstrate further knowledge and calling references. Resumes are often moot in rapid-pace technology fields where demonstration of specific, current knowledge is more important.. they are only good if they can be used as advertisements to get the attention of a company and/or get attention of different decision-makers within that company.

A home lab is useful for gaining knowledge that may be tested in an interview... like how to construct an HA MySQL or Postgres cluster that can failover itself, move the vIP and prevent split-brain. Or machine learning.

In general, I had zero family, friends or legacy connections for the following to demonstrate :

At 15, I went to interesting talks and colloquia just for the heck of it, and asked questions. At one of them, I was offered a job as a dark matter physics research assistant at IBM Almaden but couldn't take it for legal reasons (15 ½ legal minimum). I was disappointed, but moved forward.

At 16, I got a pizza flipping/cashier job with zero experience because no one else was hiring (it was a recession and there lots of potential workers). Definitely a sh*t job but a job nonetheless. I had to break down every business door in the area and it was rejection almost every time, except when it wasn't.

At 17, I moved to a job in retail software sales with only one crap job on my resume by again banging-down every door to every business for 2 miles down a main road.

At 18, I started a sysadmin consultancy and built it up to 4 clients within a single building for convenience. I was doing sysadmin, netadmin and ported a Fortran nuclear reactor simulator from UNIX to Win32 and made it run 2.5x faster by disabling swap. Also, added a Cisco 1604 128 KiB ISDN router and discovered AIX was phoning home to IBM, keeping the router always demand-dialing... nothing a little /etc/hosts couldn't fix.

About 19, I took a crap-ton of (then cheap) community college classes, 5-7 at a time, and did a Transfer Admission Agreement to guaranty admission to a decent school while working almost full-time.

21, transferred to the uni and took 4 CS quarter-system classes at time. It's even more fun with a concrete math class where proofs are pages and pages. 3-4 all-nighters a week for months at a time.

At 25, I hit pause on uni and got a full-time Lead SysAdmin job at (top 5 university name) without a degree and zero certifications. They gave me all sorts of training/certs that were of mostly limited value and no importance but gave my boss an excuse to put us up in Hollywood, rent a Jag and personal-cost road-trip to Vegas on Friday. Remote-site VMware VCP training cost $10k back then, I bet it's $15-18k now... and the tests cost $3k+ now IIRC.

At 27, I moved to a biomedical informatics department doing High Performance Computing (HPC) and what would be considered now more like SRE.

A couple of years later, I bounced to finish the degree and go into enterprise consulting.

At 31, I did on-premises, generalist (SRE-like) integration and migrations at an AWS preferred partner for Fortune 200.

At 32, I delved in the startup scene, mostly earlier YC batch folks and did a smattering of consulting gigs, getting paid $10k/week. (It's best at that point to have an LLC.) In general, hang around the right coffee shops, and meeting potential clients is inevitable.

----

Here are some preparatory elements to consider:

- Put useful things on Github and/or Youtube/Vimeo.

- Scrub social media clean or close them.

- LinkedIn is essential for legacy organizations.

- Have a resume in PDF & DOCX formats.

- Have a personal site that has limited details, links to professional social sites and a captcha'ed contact form.

- Carry personal cards with email (containing name), phone number with +country code and timezone, and a QR barcode that's the vCard.

- Cultivate a pleasant, no complaints, always on-time, always deliver, can-do/will-figure-it-out attitude.

- Make them tell you "no," because never asking is a definite "no."

[hn_throwaway_99]

> If I'm looking at learning something, my criteria is "will this information still be relevant 10 years from now?"

I don't know, in the tech world there is a ton of stuff with a lifespan shorter than 10 years, but you still often need to learn it.

I mean, I get the point of your post, and I agree having general knowledge is a critical starting point, but at the end of the day you often need to actually put hands to keyboard to get something specific done. For example, it's important to know generic programming concepts, but as someone who switched to the Node world from Java a couple years ago there was a ton of new stuff I had to learn: How Node's threading model worked, the details of the event loop, how Promises and async/await worked, the specifics of Javascript's prototype inheritance model, etc. It took me a long time to feel like I was as proficient in Node as I had been in Java because so many of the critical details are so different.

[nycdotnet]

In the 90s I was in the vanguard of “paper” MCSEs - I knew this computer networking stuff was interesting, but had no idea where to start. Back then, the core exams were all NT 4.0 related, which clearly is mostly irrelevant now, but the electives, Networking Essentials and TCP/IP are still rather relevant. The certs were good in that they tried to make sure you knew the basics of everything, and there were lots of electives to choose from (such as IE 4 Administration, which I passed, lol). In the end, I think that I agree with you that these certs have little value once your career is established (I skipped Win2k certs, and didn’t get a ton of new knowledge studying for my Win2k3 certs, which were my last). The real crying shame is all of the latchers-on who pushed these certs as effectively a get rich quick scheme. I wonder if MS is getting out of this cert biz to get away from that as much as anything.

[liendolucas]

> "will this information still be relevant 10 years from now?" This is so true. It basically applies to every single learning resource that is out there, especially good books that withstand over time. I always found certifications a waste of money and in a way I'd glad if all of this IT certification industry disapears for good.

[alisonatwork]

I think there is some value in certifications as a way of teaching unusual corner cases you might not otherwise come across.

I only have one cert - the Sun Certified Java Programmer, from back in the day when Sun still existed - and i can say it encouraged me to dive deeper into the quirks of the language. For sure, reading Effective Java gets you more bang for the buck in becoming a great Java developer, and stuff like Clean Code probably helps more with learning how to build maintainable apps, but i still feel like the SCJP was worth my time to do.

The thing i found about doing the SCJP is that it increased my curiosity around programming languages in general. Those contrived "gotcha" questions on visibility, inheritance etc made me think more deeply about how to design code in a readable and safe way - not just in Java but in other languages too.

[scarface74]

I’ve gone down the certification rabbit hole twice in my career.

The first time was in 2008 when I was trying to pivot from an expert beginner C bit twiddler to “enterprise development”. I took the six courses for MS certifications. Even then I knew that certifications were meaningless. They were basically a guided study method so I would know what I didn’t know. I never put them on any resume. By the time I went looking for my next job, they had expired and I didn’t need them.

The second time started two years ago - a AWS certs - and they are for the same reason, a guided studied path but this time the company pays for them.

AWS certs are good to have because they are requirement for a company to maintain “partner” status, it gives clients a warm and fuzzy and it helps to get through the HR filter. But no actual hiring manager (including me) gives them much weight when accessing candidates.

[scarface74]

You have to get the job first.

And being in the tech field for decades (which I have) is all about pivoting from one flavor of the month to the next.