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You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how

• YawningAngel 8y ago
  Who on earth employs a "solutions architect" whose only qualification is some random certificate that tests AWS trivia?
  • halbritt 8y ago
    Backwater IT orgs deep in the heart of Texas that have heard that they have to move everything into the cloud?
    • deboflo 8y ago
      No, startups in Silicon Valley are starting to look at these certs because they realize how expensive poorly configured cloud infrastructure can be. It’s a skill that few people have at this point.
      • halbritt 8y ago
        As a hiring manager for an infrastructure engineering team in a startup in the Silicon Valley, I have some opinion about the value of these certs. I'd likely never hire an engineer with one of these certs and no relevant experience into a full-time position. I might offer an internship, but that's not a six-figure position.
        • deboflo 8y ago
          I agree. Work experience always comes first. Anyone obtaining AWS certs without work experience should be a huge red flag.
          • halbritt 8y ago
            Maybe not a "red flag" but I wouldn't be desperate to hire anyone with no experience, even in the Silicon Valley where competition for engineers is fierce. A headcount is a headcount as far as investors are concerned, so I'd rather have someone with more experience that also costs more. Even still, I agree with the parent up above. A degree isn't strictly necessary, and if someone had the motivation, the talent, and the cert, I'd be willing to give them a chance as an intern.
  • chasd00 8y ago
    lots of people. In the Salesforce consulting world the Certified Technical Architect (CTA) cert means you walk in the door at any of the big consulting firms at managing director or equivalent rank and that comes out to around $200k/year. The cert isn't that easy to get, it requires a dozen or so prerequisite certs and then an exam plus a board review but you could probably do it in a year and a half. Also, i think over half of all CTAs are employed at Salesforce itself so you could always go work for them if consulting isn't your cup of tea (it's not for everyone that's for sure).
    • analog31 8y ago
      Granted, I know little to nothing about the IT industry, but is a "managing director" someone who has a high school diploma plus some technical skills?
      • deboflo 8y ago
        The best I’ve ever had never went to college. I was extremely productive under this person because there was a high level of trust and ownership. This was at a company whose CEO also didn’t finish his undergrad at Yale. Prior to this company I worked as an engineer at Google and had some launch/promo obsessed managers who lacked basic management skills.
    • bluedino 8y ago
      So no different than a high-level Cisco, VMware, or Redhat cert.
  • deboflo 8y ago
    More employers than you would think. The professional certs are legit. Also, 50% of some cloud native DevOps and infrastructure engineering roles are covered by the pro certs.
    • eropple 8y ago
      Covered pretty poorly. I've let my AWS certs lapse because they're not worth the time to keep them up. The hard parts of my job have very little to do with "these AWS services exist", which is the extent of what I've gotten out of AWS certs. (Nobody cares about SWF.)
      • deboflo 8y ago
        Yeah, a serverless certification would be great. These certs are more foundational in scope.
        • eropple 8y ago
          I don't see why it would be, to be frank. "Serverless" is a how. It's a tool, not a solution, and you should be expected to pick up new tools without waving around a piece of paper saying you know a tool. Except for button-pusher roles I've always hired for whys, not hows, and certification programs seem to never care about the whys. College degrees don't assert that you know how to learn, that you know how to derive the whys--but, in my experience, they correlate better than cert-hunting does.
          • deboflo 8y ago
            AWS certification exams test for basic and foundational AWS knowledge. They don’t try to do anything other than that. The “whys” are learned in the field, certified or not.
  • duxup 8y ago
    It goes both ways. Who thinks they're ever gonna do any cloud service right employing some dude who only has worked with traditional servers? You'd be surprised how many insanely expensive and dorked up cloud setups out there that honestly could have been solved / way cheaper by some guy with a random AWS cert. I'm not talking former barista turned AWS guy in a couple weeks, some background is required for that and random server guy of course, but the barriers are dropping.
  • eropple 8y ago
    Quite a few people. The returns are generally poor, which is why I chuckled at the post to which you replied; as a consultant I consistently found myself doing more work (and costing more) coming in after such credentialed-but-not-taught folks to fix the mess of "well, I know AWS, so all I'll use are AWS-recommended AWS solutions whether or not they actually fit what my project needs. AWS!". Which isn't, I stress, a knock on AWS--AWS is fine. Its managed services aren't appropriate for every situation, but the AWS certs that I've taken have never-not-once entertained the idea of not using a proper-nouned hosted service at any point. There are plenty of places where those services are fine, if sometimes overpriced even taking into account people costs...but there are plenty of places where they're not and no AWS cert I've seen has even nodded at the idea. As it happens, I use stuff I learned in my distributed systems courses--in that oh-so-awful university, hiss--on a weekly basis, if not daily, to solve those problems. (I use stuff I learned in my microeconomics and my political science and my sociology classes daily, but you can't put that on a resume, so obviously it doesn't exist.)
• moorhosj 8y ago
  ==I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.== I think this highlights the true question. Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? According to PEW, Americans believe colleges are for work training: "Americans are split on the main purpose of college, with 47% saying it is to teach work-related skills and 39% saying it is to help a student grow personally and intellectually." http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/06/02/purpose-of-college-education/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/06/02/purpose-of-c...
  • dantheman 8y ago
    It'd be hard to justify the costs - both actual college costs and opportunity costs if it was purely for intellectual curiosity.
    • moorhosj 8y ago
      What if increased intellectual curiosity has a high enough ROI over someone's lifetime to cover the costs? What if the higher education allows them to enjoy life more and thus increase quality of life over the long-run? I'm not saying either of these are the case, but it is worth exploring before we outright dismiss.
    • pnw_hazor 8y ago
      Especially since intellectual curiosity can be easily satisfied in other ways these days.
  • oralty 8y ago
    > Do colleges exist to promote education and intellectual curiosity or to train workers? When college cost in the US what it did in the 1960s this sort of little bit false-dichotomy, little bit navel gazing question was at least fairly harmless. Now it's just fucking ridiculous even for most public schools.
    • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      This. For what is costs in 2019 college had better be opening a door to a lucrative career path.
• deleted 8y ago
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• analog31 8y ago
  In my view, there's some survivorship bias going on there. Somebody has to know that the cert is in demand, and that they have a good chance of getting it. We think it's easy because we're the ones for whom learning computer skills was in fact easy. But it's not easy for everybody.
• onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  The more I learn about Texas, the more it seems like they're doing everything right.
  • yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
    Hear hear. I found the “Draw Mohammed Contest” particularly amusing. Edit: I see we have some touchy SJW-types in the house this evening :)
    • kevinskii 8y ago
      I downvoted you not to express disagreement, but because I think your comment detracts from this particular conversation. I suspect others did for the same reason. However: Some of your other recent comments are spot on. The upvotes are on me. Try not to spend them all in one place.
  • ausjke 8y ago
    Until Texas is overwhelmed by migrants from CA and Mexico that is, that joint-force is changing TX from red to purple, and to blue soon. At the moment, Austin is more liberal than most CA cities already. When TX is taken the US will officially turn into a social/welfare state, the US is doomed already, similar to what happened to Rome in the past. People from CA or Mexico are running from there for a reason, however when they arrive TX, their first to-do is to make TX look like where they used to live. They are virus.
    • the_fuzzyone 8y ago
      I couldn't hear you over your dog whistling
      • codinger 8y ago
        No kidding, wait until he finds out Texas was formerly Mexico and many of the brown people are descendant of US citizens when Texas became a part of the US.
• madcow2011 8y ago
  I didn't know about these courses, and have been contemplating getting some certifications for a while. This looks like it might really help. Thanks for posting this!
• coldtea 8y ago
  >That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? Well, colleges used to be for the elites (either rich or very talented) to learn science and to do research. It wasn't meant for vocational training for the general salaried worker. Now it's mostly that.
  • johnrogers0 8y ago
    This
  • scarface74 8y ago
    And if you just take the cert without the understanding of the underlying technology, or any practical skills you will be embarrassed when you interview. Certs by themselves are worth next to nothing. I ask one simple architectural question that weeds out many of the paper tigers: “We need to deploy a website that is fault tolerant, secure, can handle one AZ going down and scalable. How would you do it using AWS technologies?” I’m saying this as someone who has 5 AWS certs and interviews AWS Devops candidate. But I also have 20+ years of professional software development experience, a degree, and before that I was a hobbyist for 6 years.
• danmaz74 8y ago
  I really wouldn't compare learning a very specific technology with college. The idea with college level education is that you get the foundations of what you study and a learning method, so that you can adapt to changes (eg new technologies) faster and better. Of course you can learn the foundations without college and not learn them with college, but on average it's much easier to do so with that.
  • johnminter 8y ago
    Yes. Technology and business environments change. Students will only succeed if they become self-motivated, life-long learners who can identify the key problems/technology that their employers need solved/developed and rapidly build upon their skill-set to solve those problems and implement the solutions. Ideas/technology are like Legos - the point is to know how to assemble the pieces you have to build what you need. When I started my career as a scientist in a corporate analytical lab 36 years ago, corporate funding for travel and continuing education was plentiful. When budgets got tight, that was the first to go. Those of us who were self-directed learners survived the downsizing and cost-cutting much longer than those who didn't.
  • pnw_hazor 8y ago
    In my experience undergrad programs can fail hard in this too because of the limited time to cover the subject matter. 14 chapters of Digital Signal Processing in 12 weeks w00t! For many of my engineering courses at a top tier public university it was in-one-ear-out-the-other. Though, the most of stuff I learned at community college (pre-engineering) did stick.
    • rifung 8y ago
      Even if it does stick unless you use it you will likely forget.. but I think it's still useful to have learned since you hopefully retain enough that you know things exist and can look them up
  • scarface74 8y ago
    I really wouldn't compare learning a very specific technology with college. The idea with college level education is that you get the foundations of what you study and a learning method, so that you can adapt to changes (eg new technologies) faster and better. That’s all well and good until they find themselves competing with people from other countries who are being trained to hit the ground running and are willing to work for less....
• irrational 8y ago
  "That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?" Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't been exposed to before. There is a reason why University and Universe have the same root.
  • tzs 8y ago
    Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1780-05-12: > I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
    • djtriptych 8y ago
      This. If we're doing our job as a generation we are moving the focus of human education from the gross to the subtle.
    • bovermyer 8y ago
      What proportion of Americans now have the ability to study topics of less directly monetary connections as compared to those of Adams' day? I imagine the answer to that question would be interesting and nuanced.
      • WillPostForFood 8y ago
        There were only a ~dozen colleges at the time, and women couldn't attend. 90% of colonists were farmers. I don't see where there can be much nuance. American's today have vastly more ability to study a bunch of nonsense.
        • 8y ago
• jayd16 8y ago
  Are these certs actually worth anything? I usually see tech certs as a red flag. I couldn't imagine hiring a highschool grad with an aws cert and expect anything close to someone with a cs degree.