My wife is a lawyer. They don’t send her a take home test, or ask her about her side project cases, or whiteboard bar exam questions. Somehow it manages to work.
It manages to work because expensive law schools and the state Bar do all of those things on behalf of her law firm. Meanwhile you can call yourself a programmer after taking a 30 minute online tutorial and writing a hello world script – and that is a good thing. We do not need gatekeeping in this profession.
And those certifications mean absolutely nothing. There have been brain dumps for certifications for years.
Even if you don’t use brain dumps, it’s easy to memorize enough from studying something like ACloudGuru.
I got my first (of nine) AWS certifications (AWS Solution Architect) without ever logging into the console. But the only reason I get any of the certifications were to know what I don’t know and as a guided learning path.
For the first one, I was already a dev lead and wanted to know enough to know what I needed to experiment with when the company was trying to “move to the cloud”
My next 5, I was already the de facto “cloud architect” at a startup responsible for “application modernization”
And my last three (that I did within three months of each other), I was (and still am) working at AWS in the Professional Services department.
I can assure you that I don’t know but about 30%-40% of what those nine certifications cover well enough to hold an intelligent conversation with a customer and I only know the 30-40% from hands on experience.
And to be fair, I get it. Industry is too diverse to have one end all be all test. An AWS certificate won't mean much for my domain in games (unless you maybe work on online infrastructure for an ongoing service game).
But at the same time I wouldn't mind some fundamental license to optionally bypass many of these common tests.
Works fine as long as you went to a top-3 law school or graduated near the top of your class in a T14 school... I've explicitly seen lawyers lay that out as the criteria they hire by.
I'd rather deal with obnoxious interviews any day.
But the legal profession, in terms of fairness for new grads, is perhaps the worst of all professions, I'm told. Basically, if you go to a top school you make 3x the average graduate based on that alone. While there is a decent correlation between school and talent, it is by no means strong enough to justify the phenomenon. Certainly it is not like this in other developed countries.
Computer Science has unfortunately been headed in that direction but at least an A+ graduate at a state school has a chance at getting the better offers.
It manages to work because expensive law schools and the state Bar do all of those things on behalf of her law firm. Meanwhile you can call yourself a programmer after taking a 30 minute online tutorial and writing a hello world script – and that is a good thing. We do not need gatekeeping in this profession.