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So, AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points ("Klout", anyone?) that they have been convinc

So, AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points ("Klout", anyone?) that they have been convinced is worth something on their resumes. Instead of actually providing a real technical support team. Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars, so I expect it might actually work.

tokumei 5y ago
AWS has good support if you’re a high-level customer. We have a rep we can arrange meetings with on a days notice if we need anything.
sofixa 5y ago
They do provide a real technical support team, you just have to pay for it. And they state it will be driven by customers, partners and employees of AWS, so at least on paper they aren't fully relying on customers.
CactusOnFire 5y ago
I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam. HR teams don't. If ponying up $400 every 3 years gets me a more senior position with slightly better compensation, it's worth the ROI.
- yob28 5y ago
  I’ve never paid for one, get your company to pay the fees
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Really only applicable at certain kinds of company, leaning on certifications usually means it’s a very bureaucratic company or one with not enough competency to figure out if a candidate is any good. Likewise if a candidate has a lot of certifications there’s usually a question “does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests “
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Curious to know what % of all companies you probed to get to your "usually".
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Many dozens through the years and across the spectrum of industries, company sizes, and ages.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        Dozens of %?
  - btown 5y ago
    > to figure out if a candidate is any good In a lot of organizations, the people responsible for identifying if a candidate is "good" and the people who are responsible for calibrating their offer, and where they enter a ladder in terms of seniority, are entirely different groups. Certifications are justifiable insofar as they're aimed entirely at the latter.
    - iamleppert 5y ago
      And those are precisely the organizations I avoid like the plague. I’ve gotten to offer stage before and sensed this type of disconnect and promptly declined to continue in the process. It’s a huge red flag if the finances of a technical organization are controlled by people who don’t understand technology and consequently that unable to ascertain and appropriately appraise value.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Many of those organisations are strong contributors to the FOSS that everyone around here enjoys playing with.
  - tyingq 5y ago
- 123pie123 5y ago
  just another sales tactic like the old MSCE reinvented, nothing has changed the circle has been reinvented - again! Lets call it the circle reinvention club or does this already exist?
- albert_e 5y ago
  I have a few certifications. all AWS certs are paid for by my employer through exam vouchers -- who in turn gets free/discounted exam vouchers from AWS through their partnership either directly or indirectly discounted through partner credits worth hundreds and thousands of dollars of AWS usage that we as an org definitely use up to offset our consumption bills. I personally never paid a single dollar for AWS cert exam. I did pay for a few AWS exam prep courses and study resources -- and some of them were reimbursed by my employer. You don't have to renew all your expired certs if you don't see the need and you have moved on to bigger/different things in your career. In my experience studying for a cert exam fills in gaps and brings you up to date on best practices and newer features. I don't believe anyone's job is so broad and deep at the same time that their hands-on experience makes the certification completely redundant. EDIT: Here is a person sharing their experience -- he/she may be overdoing it with the number of certs but they are looking at certs as a means to learn more beyond their current job role and look for career growth https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/ks28yi/7x_aws_certified_passed_the_aws_certified_data/gidfsql/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/ks28yi/7... If nothing, the knowledge from the certs give you the necessary footing to approach your next project/job with the right mindset in areas your previous experience may not have exposed you to.
- hericium 5y ago
  I had one of their certifications. It expired a few years back and I don't intend to renew it or acquire a new one. Below position presented to HR or tech hiring people usually works: "I used to have AWS certification. Amazon even prolonged it from 2 to 3 years but I had no reasons to renew it afterwards. I still work on this stuff and my practical knowledge isn't outdated. I won't remember what pricing tricks every single service has but I'm able to quickly set up or fix things" Sure, there are businesses that require you to have a shiny, fresh certifications. There are also companies that value their employees' and contractors' ability to choose what is worth doing and what seems to be a waste of time and energy.
Hikikomori 5y ago
Any contact I've had with AWS support has been excellent, but we also pay for premium/enterprise/whatever. Had a bug with a recently released API and got attention from the engineering team to fix it.
unbanned 5y ago
Like Aws heros already do for marketing and awareness lol
artursapek 5y ago
Why is topcommentguy on HN always shitting on the post subject
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  I actually appreciate it. I'll often read the article then check the comments for the other viewpoint(s).
- staticassertion 5y ago
  There's this mistake people make, especially in tech, where if someone says "X is bad" people think "Wow, they must really know about X". There's tons of 'hot takes' and criticism because it's really easy to look and feel smart when you're the person levying those.
- Msw242 5y ago
  And then the top response to the top response is usually pedantic strawmanning
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Because you can't downvote an HN post, and shouldn't downvote when you disagree, so people end up upvoting contrary opinions they agree with. The sequence is usually [Post with a position A] -> top comment (disagrees with position A) -> top child comment (disagrees with top comment, usually focusing a single, least-significant point raised by top comment)
dataminded 5y ago
AWS enterprise support is amazing. Everything from calls and emails to multi-day workshops with the product team. You get more than you pay for with them. I'm also a fan of the AWS certifications from the employee side. Not everybody is pulling X00K at a FAANG. If you want a cloud job at regular enterprise, it's a good way to get your foot in the door.
- twosugars 5y ago
  Because if you rate 1 star that is going to their annual performance, it is very stressful job to work at aws support, in an year you would have to be get 4.8 overall rating which is very hard to get because for the most part customers doesn't rate when they had good experience.
- netfortius 5y ago
  You must have not tried to use Outposts when they came out.
jackthetab 5y ago
Two things. Thing the First: > Instead of actually providing a real technical support team. Apparently you've never used their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. Not only technical knowledge but dealing with customers, providing help above and beyond the actual question in front of their face, etc. The only other technical support team that has impressed me this much is Kraken's. Yes, I have to pay for that support. I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile ("What's wrong with my flugelmesserbeano?"), for my medical conditions ("Is it safe to take these two medications together?"), for my house exterior ("If I don't fix that drainage problem what could happen in five years?"), for my house interior ("How should I Remodel the kitchen to fit my lifestyle?"), etc.
- jackthetab 5y ago
  Thing the Second: > Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars and quoting CactusOnFire > I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam. I too used to look down on certification. I made a damn good living "doing computers" (still do): networking, development, what's now called BI reporting, backup and restores, etc. This for multiple startups, SMBs and $BIGCORPs. I then wanted to get into training: MCSE, SCSA, LPI, etc. For that, I had to be certified. No problem, I thought, certifications are for fools and children; this will be a cake walk. Great Ghu! There was _so_ _much_ I didn't know or even know about. Certifications filled in _so_ many gaps and minutiae. (You don't know what you don't know.) Not only did it fill in the gaps, allowing me to better utilize the knowledge I already had it let me make more sense of those shapes I see off in the tech horizon. Now because I have these certs, should you then treat me as if I was the next coming of Ritchie? :-| Certs show that you have a _base_ knowledge, not that your the reincarnation of Turing. Are there people who abuse the system? Sure! Name a system involving humans that isn't/hasn't been abused, corrupted, and twisted beyond what it was meant to do. Go ahead. I'll wait. I've come to the conclusion that people who sht on people (mostly utes [sic]) for getting technical certifications are the same ones who sht on recent high school graduates: Oh, you have a high school diploma? How nice. /s It says here you took English and math classes. Let's see how good you are. Write a 5,000 word dissertation on the impact of Don Quixote on Western literature, then prove Fermat's Last Theorem. If you can't do that in 30 minutes, GTFO you poser.' What's that? You don't treat ppl with high school diplomas or bachelor/masters' degrees like that? Then why treat people going after certs like that?
staticassertion 5y ago
> AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points Like literally everyone else?
ozzythecat 5y ago
It hasn’t been free, but I’ve regularly used AWS support. My experience has been nothing but very positive. Meta comment — It’s disappointing the top voted comment does nothing but spread negativity. I see attitude like this that automatically assumes the worst in anything ever happening and tries to poison the well for others. I’m grateful and incredibly lucky that my co workers aren’t like this.
- theteapot 5y ago
  Which well? The well of positivity has been poisoned?
tibbar 5y ago
If they do it right, they’ll treat this internally as a user feedback forum. If a question about a service has hundreds of upvotes that almost certainly means the service itself should change so that either the answer to the question is obvious or (better) the question is no longer meaningful. Here’s hoping!
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
First post FUD needs to be autobanned on HN. This toxic negativity leaves such a poor taste in my mouth
- gopher_space 5y ago
  The flip side is that I’ve had such negative experiences with Amazon across all of their services that the people in this thread talking about how wonderful support has been seem like shills. I think it’s possible to damage your reputation beyond repair, making even ridiculous claims sound plausible.
  - jen20 5y ago
    I just checked the numbers - in 2021 I opened 19 AWS support cases. Every single one of them was resolved quickly and satisfactorily. By contrast in a previous job I dealt with Azure support on the regular, an experience which was akin to pulling teeth. I’ve yet to actually get through to a support person at GCP whenever I’ve tried.
  - amznbyebyebye 5y ago
    At AWS support has a direct line to product and engineering service teams so if support can’t resolve it, there is an engineer on call who can help out depending on the need. Worst case they don’t support what is needed and it goes on the backlog.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    That doesn't have anything to do with the comment in question, other than both of you dislike Amazon.
    - gopher_space 5y ago
      My point is that I’m primed to believe FUD due to past behavior.
      - 1123581321 5y ago
jlarocco 5y ago
AWS actually has fantastic support, especially for a tech company. My previous company was tiny, and super cheap (they wouldn't even pay for Slack), and even at that level we never had a problem talking to real, live support people, and they were always pretty helpful.
anothernewdude 5y ago
Yes, they're duplicating Stack Overflow.
emptysongglass 5y ago
> Instead of actually providing a real technical support team You sound like someone who has exactly zero dealings with AWS support. They set the bar in this industry. The first thing I do when I join a new employer is reach out to our Account Manager or Technical Account Manager at AWS to set up bi-weekly cadence meetings and ask for specific criticism from their Solutions Architects on whatever I'm thinking of implementing. They will ask my team for feedback on next features they're thinking to implement. They have been the finest design partners I have ever encountered. I consider my last AM a friend. Your comment is of such poor quality, it should be flagged for misinformation, and I almost never flag here on HN, even on politically divisive subjects.
nnurmanov 5y ago
I created brainpick.co.uk, where people who have given up hopes to resolve the issue, could sponsor a question, so people could work for money, instead of reputation.
TeeMassive 5y ago
> So, AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points For me putting my SO profile in my resume really was a boon that allowed me to skip a lot of the technical interview (not all of it, of course).
peakaboo 5y ago
I think the certifications are worth it, at least the pro level ones. Because they do give you a full picture of good AWS architecture and what services are a good fit together. I've seen what some developers without certifications put together on AWS and it's a mess. But this re:Post thing I don't believe in personally. I'm so tired of these giant tech companies building walled gardens and censoring and controlling anyone inside.
jsemrau 5y ago
finclout.io solves that better. No more "free work" for klout.

tokumei 5y ago

AWS has good support if you’re a high-level customer. We have a rep we can arrange meetings with on a days notice if we need anything.

sofixa 5y ago

They do provide a real technical support team, you just have to pay for it. And they state it will be driven by customers, partners and employees of AWS, so at least on paper they aren't fully relying on customers.

CactusOnFire 5y ago

I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam. HR teams don't. If ponying up $400 every 3 years gets me a more senior position with slightly better compensation, it's worth the ROI.

yob28 5y ago
I’ve never paid for one, get your company to pay the fees
colechristensen 5y ago
Really only applicable at certain kinds of company, leaning on certifications usually means it’s a very bureaucratic company or one with not enough competency to figure out if a candidate is any good. Likewise if a candidate has a lot of certifications there’s usually a question “does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests “
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Curious to know what % of all companies you probed to get to your "usually".
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Many dozens through the years and across the spectrum of industries, company sizes, and ages.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Dozens of %?
- btown 5y ago
  > to figure out if a candidate is any good In a lot of organizations, the people responsible for identifying if a candidate is "good" and the people who are responsible for calibrating their offer, and where they enter a ladder in terms of seniority, are entirely different groups. Certifications are justifiable insofar as they're aimed entirely at the latter.
  - iamleppert 5y ago
    And those are precisely the organizations I avoid like the plague. I’ve gotten to offer stage before and sensed this type of disconnect and promptly declined to continue in the process. It’s a huge red flag if the finances of a technical organization are controlled by people who don’t understand technology and consequently that unable to ascertain and appropriately appraise value.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Many of those organisations are strong contributors to the FOSS that everyone around here enjoys playing with.
- tyingq 5y ago
123pie123 5y ago
just another sales tactic like the old MSCE reinvented, nothing has changed the circle has been reinvented - again! Lets call it the circle reinvention club or does this already exist?
albert_e 5y ago
I have a few certifications. all AWS certs are paid for by my employer through exam vouchers -- who in turn gets free/discounted exam vouchers from AWS through their partnership either directly or indirectly discounted through partner credits worth hundreds and thousands of dollars of AWS usage that we as an org definitely use up to offset our consumption bills. I personally never paid a single dollar for AWS cert exam. I did pay for a few AWS exam prep courses and study resources -- and some of them were reimbursed by my employer. You don't have to renew all your expired certs if you don't see the need and you have moved on to bigger/different things in your career. In my experience studying for a cert exam fills in gaps and brings you up to date on best practices and newer features. I don't believe anyone's job is so broad and deep at the same time that their hands-on experience makes the certification completely redundant. EDIT: Here is a person sharing their experience -- he/she may be overdoing it with the number of certs but they are looking at certs as a means to learn more beyond their current job role and look for career growth https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/ks28yi/7x_aws_certified_passed_the_aws_certified_data/gidfsql/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/ks28yi/7... If nothing, the knowledge from the certs give you the necessary footing to approach your next project/job with the right mindset in areas your previous experience may not have exposed you to.
hericium 5y ago
I had one of their certifications. It expired a few years back and I don't intend to renew it or acquire a new one. Below position presented to HR or tech hiring people usually works: "I used to have AWS certification. Amazon even prolonged it from 2 to 3 years but I had no reasons to renew it afterwards. I still work on this stuff and my practical knowledge isn't outdated. I won't remember what pricing tricks every single service has but I'm able to quickly set up or fix things" Sure, there are businesses that require you to have a shiny, fresh certifications. There are also companies that value their employees' and contractors' ability to choose what is worth doing and what seems to be a waste of time and energy.

Hikikomori 5y ago

Any contact I've had with AWS support has been excellent, but we also pay for premium/enterprise/whatever. Had a bug with a recently released API and got attention from the engineering team to fix it.

unbanned 5y ago

Like Aws heros already do for marketing and awareness lol

artursapek 5y ago

Why is topcommentguy on HN always shitting on the post subject

ARandomerDude 5y ago
I actually appreciate it. I'll often read the article then check the comments for the other viewpoint(s).
staticassertion 5y ago
There's this mistake people make, especially in tech, where if someone says "X is bad" people think "Wow, they must really know about X". There's tons of 'hot takes' and criticism because it's really easy to look and feel smart when you're the person levying those.
Msw242 5y ago
And then the top response to the top response is usually pedantic strawmanning
sangnoir 5y ago
Because you can't downvote an HN post, and shouldn't downvote when you disagree, so people end up upvoting contrary opinions they agree with. The sequence is usually [Post with a position A] -> top comment (disagrees with position A) -> top child comment (disagrees with top comment, usually focusing a single, least-significant point raised by top comment)

dataminded 5y ago

AWS enterprise support is amazing. Everything from calls and emails to multi-day workshops with the product team. You get more than you pay for with them. I'm also a fan of the AWS certifications from the employee side. Not everybody is pulling X00K at a FAANG. If you want a cloud job at regular enterprise, it's a good way to get your foot in the door.

twosugars 5y ago
Because if you rate 1 star that is going to their annual performance, it is very stressful job to work at aws support, in an year you would have to be get 4.8 overall rating which is very hard to get because for the most part customers doesn't rate when they had good experience.
netfortius 5y ago
You must have not tried to use Outposts when they came out.

jackthetab 5y ago

Two things. Thing the First: > Instead of actually providing a real technical support team. Apparently you've never used their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. Not only technical knowledge but dealing with customers, providing help above and beyond the actual question in front of their face, etc. The only other technical support team that has impressed me this much is Kraken's. Yes, I have to pay for that support. I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile ("What's wrong with my flugelmesserbeano?"), for my medical conditions ("Is it safe to take these two medications together?"), for my house exterior ("If I don't fix that drainage problem what could happen in five years?"), for my house interior ("How should I Remodel the kitchen to fit my lifestyle?"), etc.

jackthetab 5y ago
Thing the Second: > Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars and quoting CactusOnFire > I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam. I too used to look down on certification. I made a damn good living "doing computers" (still do): networking, development, what's now called BI reporting, backup and restores, etc. This for multiple startups, SMBs and $BIGCORPs. I then wanted to get into training: MCSE, SCSA, LPI, etc. For that, I had to be certified. No problem, I thought, certifications are for fools and children; this will be a cake walk. Great Ghu! There was _so_ _much_ I didn't know or even know about. Certifications filled in _so_ many gaps and minutiae. (You don't know what you don't know.) Not only did it fill in the gaps, allowing me to better utilize the knowledge I already had it let me make more sense of those shapes I see off in the tech horizon. Now because I have these certs, should you then treat me as if I was the next coming of Ritchie? :-| Certs show that you have a _base_ knowledge, not that your the reincarnation of Turing. Are there people who abuse the system? Sure! Name a system involving humans that isn't/hasn't been abused, corrupted, and twisted beyond what it was meant to do. Go ahead. I'll wait. I've come to the conclusion that people who sht on people (mostly utes [sic]) for getting technical certifications are the same ones who sht on recent high school graduates: Oh, you have a high school diploma? How nice. /s It says here you took English and math classes. Let's see how good you are. Write a 5,000 word dissertation on the impact of Don Quixote on Western literature, then prove Fermat's Last Theorem. If you can't do that in 30 minutes, GTFO you poser.' What's that? You don't treat ppl with high school diplomas or bachelor/masters' degrees like that? Then why treat people going after certs like that?

staticassertion 5y ago

> AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points Like literally everyone else?

ozzythecat 5y ago

It hasn’t been free, but I’ve regularly used AWS support. My experience has been nothing but very positive. Meta comment — It’s disappointing the top voted comment does nothing but spread negativity. I see attitude like this that automatically assumes the worst in anything ever happening and tries to poison the well for others. I’m grateful and incredibly lucky that my co workers aren’t like this.

theteapot 5y ago
Which well? The well of positivity has been poisoned?

tibbar 5y ago

If they do it right, they’ll treat this internally as a user feedback forum. If a question about a service has hundreds of upvotes that almost certainly means the service itself should change so that either the answer to the question is obvious or (better) the question is no longer meaningful. Here’s hoping!

amznbyebyebye 5y ago

First post FUD needs to be autobanned on HN. This toxic negativity leaves such a poor taste in my mouth

gopher_space 5y ago
The flip side is that I’ve had such negative experiences with Amazon across all of their services that the people in this thread talking about how wonderful support has been seem like shills. I think it’s possible to damage your reputation beyond repair, making even ridiculous claims sound plausible.
- jen20 5y ago
  I just checked the numbers - in 2021 I opened 19 AWS support cases. Every single one of them was resolved quickly and satisfactorily. By contrast in a previous job I dealt with Azure support on the regular, an experience which was akin to pulling teeth. I’ve yet to actually get through to a support person at GCP whenever I’ve tried.
- amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  At AWS support has a direct line to product and engineering service teams so if support can’t resolve it, there is an engineer on call who can help out depending on the need. Worst case they don’t support what is needed and it goes on the backlog.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  That doesn't have anything to do with the comment in question, other than both of you dislike Amazon.
  - gopher_space 5y ago
    My point is that I’m primed to believe FUD due to past behavior.
    - 1123581321 5y ago

jlarocco 5y ago

AWS actually has fantastic support, especially for a tech company. My previous company was tiny, and super cheap (they wouldn't even pay for Slack), and even at that level we never had a problem talking to real, live support people, and they were always pretty helpful.

anothernewdude 5y ago

Yes, they're duplicating Stack Overflow.

emptysongglass 5y ago

> Instead of actually providing a real technical support team You sound like someone who has exactly zero dealings with AWS support. They set the bar in this industry. The first thing I do when I join a new employer is reach out to our Account Manager or Technical Account Manager at AWS to set up bi-weekly cadence meetings and ask for specific criticism from their Solutions Architects on whatever I'm thinking of implementing. They will ask my team for feedback on next features they're thinking to implement. They have been the finest design partners I have ever encountered. I consider my last AM a friend. Your comment is of such poor quality, it should be flagged for misinformation, and I almost never flag here on HN, even on politically divisive subjects.

nnurmanov 5y ago

I created brainpick.co.uk, where people who have given up hopes to resolve the issue, could sponsor a question, so people could work for money, instead of reputation.

TeeMassive 5y ago

> So, AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points For me putting my SO profile in my resume really was a boon that allowed me to skip a lot of the technical interview (not all of it, of course).

peakaboo 5y ago

I think the certifications are worth it, at least the pro level ones. Because they do give you a full picture of good AWS architecture and what services are a good fit together. I've seen what some developers without certifications put together on AWS and it's a mess. But this re:Post thing I don't believe in personally. I'm so tired of these giant tech companies building walled gardens and censoring and controlling anyone inside.

jsemrau 5y ago

finclout.io solves that better. No more "free work" for klout.