As a SDE (IC, not management) that has been involved in hiring "yes/no" questions, I've found that everything else (and how well they interview, and code sample

As a SDE (IC, not management) that has been involved in hiring "yes/no" questions, I've found that everything else (and how well they interview, and code samples) is still much more determinant. - If they have the certs and they look decent on code samples or architectural questions, it's probably fine, but the certs have little to no impact on this - If they only have the certs but no personal projects, no contributions to open source, absolutely no code samples, the certs are probably just for show and pointless I've seen numerous cases where people have every single edX/Triplebyte/whatever cert in existence but are orders of magnitude worse than a first year CS student. NB: HR usually forces basic screening of anything before I see it; including basic recruiter given online coding tests/basic algorithm stuff. I personally hate whiteboarding, and I hate whiteboarding others. I usually do deep what-if questions, akin to asking for things like explanations of tree shaking or promises vs async/await for frontend devs, or figuring out if they know how to actually use devtools for anything like profiling, memory usage, service workers, etc. I've found that this usually results in better selection (and more tolerable teammates) compared to whiteboarding where you can kind of just rote-memorisation the test while having absolutely no idea how to do anything. As a frontend example, someone that has done performance profiling and analysis, heap snapshotting/sampling and the ability to read them (yes, those tabs in devtools that for some reason almost no one uses) has a significantly higher chance of being knowledgeable, IMO.