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This will not apply to all companies, but for our hiring decisions certs have an adverse effect. If someone puts many certifications on their resume my expectat

This will not apply to all companies, but for our hiring decisions certs have an adverse effect. If someone puts many certifications on their resume my expectations are lower and I likely won't consider them for interviews. It's a negative signal in my experience. Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff instead of wasting time on artificial tests that require memorization and exist largely as a revenue stream for certification providers.

bawolff 4y ago
I have also seen this. A large number of certs on a resume (more than 4) is the most consistent negative signal i have seen. I assume part of the reason is that certs are expensive and not well respected, so the only reason you would get them is if you had no other options.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  Is this recent? I held every cert under the sun in the 2000s and companies GOBBLED ME UP. In the early 2010s I could walk into companies by simply having a VCP cert. I'm sure if I held a K8s or some hashicorp cert, or AWS or Azure certs I would be pulled into any org hiring today. And I put all of my certs on my resume (that I can fit with most recent first). I should also clarify, I only put certs that matter (why put an Azure cert on a resume submission to an AWS shop) and certs that are recent (I have 20 years on my resume, why would i put my CCNA on there). I think a large number of irrelevant certs would be a negative signal. I think a large number of relevant certs AND job history to back them up would be a super strong signal.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Idk, i haven't been in the industry long enough to compare. Also, i work in security (in north america and not gov), maybe other areas are more pro-cert.
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      I also disagree with your first comment. Large amounts of difficult certs have never been a negative signal and I’ve been doing this for like 20 years. Especially in cyber security where a wide breadth of various knowledge is needed, certs can really help show who has the ”full-stack” so to speak. That being said, 20+ CompTIA cents isn’t going to move the needle for me. I say all that to say “it depends on the cert”
      - bawolff 4y ago
        I think that's fair. I more saw it as the 20+ comptia certs.
      - evgen 4y ago
        Actually cyber security is one area where a lot of certs are a strong negative signal. They basically broadcast course-taking and cert-chasing over real world experience. If you have an OSCP cert I will treat that as a potentially good signal, but if your CV includes CISSP I will walk in to an interview with low expectations and if it has CEH or similar wastes of time the recruiting lead would have known to filter the CV out so that I do not even see it. This if for FAANG environments though, so maybe if you are aiming for a corporate cube farm in a smaller market other certs will be useful. Just not with me.
        0xBDB 4y ago
        As a Red Team manager with both the OSCP and CISSP, in my opinion neither is worthless but they are oversold and they aren't really comparable. The CISSP is a risk management cert that's sometimes oversold as an infosec cert. It's been quite useful to me in dealing with the (Fortune 1000 mostly) bureaucracies that take Red Team and pen test findings and turn them into remediations or risk acceptances. The OSCP is a technical cert that's oversold in a different way: because the test is fairly difficult, lots of people assume it's an advanced cert. It's a beginner cert (and Offensive Security has several more you can take after it). What it does prove is that you probably have the right mindset to be a penetration tester (which is not necessarily the same mindset you need for Red Teaming, i.e., unannounced adversarial simulation). tl;dr: I don't think any cert is bad as long as everybody understands what it's for. But I'm one of those people who collects them (at employer expense) as a way to structure my learning, and then never renews them.
  - native_samples 4y ago
    I remember many years ago, Google internally knew that one of the only signals obtainable from CVs was the negative signal from number of certs. I don't think this knowledge was actually used for anything, it was just a correlation, but yeah it's sort of an open secret in the business that the sort of people who get lots of certifications do very badly when asked to demonstrate actual technical skills.
  - BossingAround 4y ago
    It's a response to large number of people who know very little and want to compensate with memorizing stuff and passing certificates without deeper understanding of what they're doing. It's kind of a stupid response, especially considering that the same people would most likely view 10+ certs on your CV as a positive if your name is western-sounding...
- wyclif 4y ago
  I'm interested in an informed discussion of a comparison of the merits of the differing tech certs, not so much talking about scuba, finance, or truck driving. How does the quality and value of, say, CompTIA, Cisco, AWS, OSCP, K8s, Linux+ and other certs compare with each other?
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  I'm enough of a domain expert in certain niches that I've participated in creating certification exams. The reason it can develop into a negative signal: the question banks are rapidly exhausted by the exam dump industry, and for even some esoteric exams 90%+ of the question bank with exactly correct answers are generated within a year of the exam's introduction. With the popular exams, it is mind-numbingly fast. Think days to weeks. Crowdsourcing / MTurking the question banks is depressingly effective if you sweated over nearly a thousand question bank items for a few months with a few other expensive experts. Labs in the exams are a way to blunt this, but I think the exam dump industry has probably come up with a way to defeat labs as well by now, because the labs run a fixed set of scenarios with variations in parameters but not the general gist. It's better, but still hackable. What I've come up with requires discipline by a team documenting the issues they've fixed in the past, but it is so far 100% foolproof. Pick a random relatively self-contained issue your team fixed in the past; this is the most critical step governing the quality of this technique's results. Reproduce the issue in a scratch environment. Sit down the candidate in front of a workstation set up to their preferences you gathered in advance, with all the tooling they prefer, simplifying your superfluous environment specifics where possible (like logging them into various accounts ahead of time). Set their expectations ahead of time that they will be team / pair troubleshooting for half an hour, that you aren't evaluating whether they find the root cause or not, you're evaluating how well they work with others troubleshooting an issue in some system/language/etc. they claim they are a domain expert in. Dive in. Without fail, the ones who exam dumped their way to a certification will thrash about. Hard. Most common is they will not know where to even start, deer-in-the-headlights. Even telling the candidate straight out where to start, by using your 20/20 hindsight and artificially picking a starting point 1-2 steps away from the root cause still does not unlock them; jumping to a known good starting point is useful for the experienced candidates who freeze under interview pressure, as they usually unfreeze when given such a big head start from your IRL issue that you ran into for the first time. You can often get a good gauge of how much and how deeply the candidate worked with the stack they claim competency in by how they navigate around, ask questions, probe for error messages, etc.
csydas 4y ago
I wouldn't dismiss certs that fast as from my experience hiring for technical roles, it's a wash. I've had people with more certs than braincells, and people with certs that I loved and wanted on my team immediately. It at least gave me something to talk about more directly because I can have some expectation on tech they've worked with. I personally don't chase certs for myself because I don't see the point, but I find them as fairly okay talking points on a CV. And it's hard to argue any interview unfairness since the cert should imply certain levels of familiarity with a technology. Edit: I do need to add that the cert concern was a real thing in our company but after some analysis, we sadly found some biases from the interviewers as they only considered certs for certain candidates to be a negative signal. I put a stop to that fast reminding people of candidates from more western countries with gobs of certs, and they legit didn't know their ass from their head, much less how to do anything besides press the button the manual said to press.
- btown 4y ago
  To this point, occasionally you'll come across candidates who have obtained certs in part because that is the way they were trained to learn in their specific personal & cultural context - but the reason why they chose to learn so much in the first place? It might be indicative of a true, passionate, focus-seeking curiosity that would make them a fantastic team member. And perhaps they hadn't had the opportunity to work in a place that treats learning and growth as a holistic part of the job. These people can become culture carriers in a tremendously positive way. It's part of the reason I try to make "cover paragraphs" (not necessarily full cover letters) an important part of every application - it's important to give people the opportunity to let their passion shine through at the earliest parts of a process.
  - csydas 4y ago
    I get what you're saying and I think this is true for a lot of people, but hear me out. I actually rarely read too deeply into the CV except as a source for some talking points. I have a phenomenal recruitment team so I rarely need to "guess" on a candidate from a CV (truly, they are exceptional and they really get what my team is looking for and our candidates love them also cause the recruiters took a lot of time to learn enough to talk competently about our tech scope) If my recruiters pass me a candidate, the candidate is at least good enough to bullshit fairly competently. We structure our interviews to be very conversational -- the same points are always hit and we have a loose grading structure, but mostly the goal is to get the candidates to talk about problems and explain their thoughts really well. I do feel bad, because I can tell some put a ton of effort into their CV, but I rarely pay that much attention to it besides ctrl+f for some subjects I want to talk about or looking for a few keywords outside of our core competencies just to see how they talk about these edge cases. Passion is good, but for me, passion shines through during the interview and the conversation and how they love to talk about what they work on. Even with the most nervous candidates, we've taken a lot of time to practice just being approachable and interested, which helps even the shyest candidates really open up. I know I had one candidate pretty recently where they were quite shy (and also interviewing in a second language, not their primary so lots of stress there). It took a little bit, but by the end of the interview, they were blushing red with pride and smiling uncontrollably with how proud of themselves they were for answering really tough questions and scenarios we had for them. (and they knocked it out of the park for a DevOps position, I don't think I've been so happy with a candidate in awhile) I wish we got this for every candidate; their passion gets tapped and just suddenly I see someone gushing about their favorite topic.
javajosh 4y ago
This is also my experience. However, I would say something like Amazon's certifications may be useful if your company has gone all-in on AWS. Amazon (and GCP and Azure) have such a huge variety of offerings, and it's something that Amazon is asserting this person is at least familiar with what these things are and how they fit together, and the trade-offs. On-the-job study is, in general, not going to be good enough to get a comprehensive understanding like that, and a cert course makes a lot of sense. I suppose if there was a reasonably trusted organization that could give the same cert for "front-end javascript", that would be good too, since there would be great value in surveying at least the major features of the current js landscape. (Probably not practical given the breadth and depth and dynamism of the space, plus the ambiguity of selection. And also, not sure what org would or could do this!)
ricksebak 4y ago
> Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff Just FYI that at some companies, collecting certificates is indeed real world stuff. Some companies use it for marketing (“we have the most certifications in the industry”) and some need to to satisfy vendor partner requirements (“AWS Premier Partners are required to have X number of certificates”). It doesn’t seem fair to penalize a candidate just because they did what their company asked for.
- noirbot 4y ago
  Sure, but my question would be, are you, as the resume writer, more proud of the cert you got via your work or of the work you did at work? I've done cert stuff before as part of my job, but it never rose to the level of being relevant to put on my resume over other things I did. My rule is always to only put something on my resume if I could talk for 2-3 minutes about it in a way that makes me look good/useful. Most of my certs, the only real thing I could say is "I spent 10-30 hours watching videos and then took a test well." I wouldn't really want to work for a company that valued those skills vs. me explaining how I applied the things I learned from the cert.
hijinks 4y ago
as someone in Devops/SRE I hold the same thinking as you. Whenever I see an interview come in loaded with certs, I automatically think they just know how to take tests and study for them. It's almost 100% that they fail the interview because they don't know how to put the learning into real world solutions.
- yakak 4y ago
  Perhaps they get enough interviews where the cert is accepted that it isn't worth their time to review these technologies ahead of interviews.
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
  I find this take funny. My past company had a huge pile of credits for certs because they valued them and I figured “I’ve been working with AWS; why not?” I didn’t study or prepare at all and went in using only the hands-on knowledge I picked up over my career. I came out with all the associate certs, the AWS solutions architect pro, and their network specialty. As a hiring manager I find certs to be a neutral indicator: you at least have to know the material to get them, but plenty of people learn the material hands-on, not from books.
  - 988747 4y ago
    Also, sometimes companies will force employees to get certified for many reasons. My own company was recently looking to renew their Gold Partnership with Microsoft and so they were looking for victims to get Microsoft certified, because, apparently, that's the requirement for partnership. As for why companies need such partnership: it speaks well to managerial types, therefore helps win contracts.
dilDDoS 4y ago
> do real-world stuff instead of wasting time on artificial tests that require memorization Interesting, since the majority of tech interviews (from what I’ve gathered) rely on artificial tests that require memorization. I’m not disagreeing, I also think real world experience is infinitely more valuable. But it seems like certs could actually be an indicator that a candidate would perform quite well in LC style interviews.
- noirbot 4y ago
  It's a bit glib to say that even the most leetcode interviews "require memorization". It's certainly possible to do most of them from "memorized" first principles of how various bits of CS components work instead of brute-force memorizing, and in general even when I do code problems on interviews, I mostly try to use them to either demonstrate that or determine that the candidate actually understands WHY you would do things that way. Certs on the other hand are often just pure memorization. There's not really any way to "infer" which AWS service name matches to which service function. You either know the name of the API call or you don't. It doesn't provide much signal that you actually know how to apply that information to anything practical. Even at their worst, most crappy whiteboard code interviews are still literally testing if you can literally write functional code, which is closer to what you do on the job than memorizing the Cisco books.
ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
Be careful about the bias in single-metric gatekeeping strategies like this. Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of leisure. Certificates are possibly the only foot in the door for folks working multiple jobs with kids, etc. and the government often pays the tuition for low income folks. Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so. I know it’s tough to have to whittle down a list of candidates on paper, but the closer you are to judging a person’s path rather than their capability, the more likely you’ll be to favor people who mirror your cultural identity and experiences. So if someone looks like they’ve got the requisite skills. It certainly doesn’t mean everybody with a pile of certs is worth considering, but it’s probably not a good immediate disqualifier.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not necccesarily. Depending on the cert and field it may make sense to. The goal of getting the cert should be to learn skills. If you've done that, the piece of paper doesn't matter. > Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so The people with all the certs still got interviewed where i worked last, it was just a consistent pattern that they bombed the interview, usually very badly on very basic questions.
  - ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
    If you've got a few certs and two jobs under your belt that you got because of those certs, how would anyone imagine that those certs would prevent them from getting jobs? For people with traditional industry on-ramping, it might seem intuitive that someone would want to hide these certs from people for their lack of prestige. To others, hiding your only officially-recognized qualifications seems absolutely ridiculous.
dtjb 4y ago
>Your time is better spent working on side projects This seems like a shaky assumption. Keep in mind that many companies, like mine, sponsor or even mandate the certification process. Meaning the justification, time, and costs didn't come from the candidate you're dismissing.
johnchristopher 4y ago
I don't see how writing a blog post is superior to a CCNA/CCNP lab test but okay (ACTUALLY NO, IT'S NOT OKAY).
tootie 4y ago
I consider side projects to be absolutely meaningless predictors of anything. A cert is a poor substitute for experience but it's a signal of someone willing to learn and grow through diligence. Side projects are usually just arbitrary in value. In the very rare case that someone has a real blockbuster side project with a lot of users I'd be concerned about how much time they'd spend on it. Getting a PR approved on a mainstream project would be impressive though.
- creativeCak3 4y ago
  Nice try, manager ;) We work on side projects because we __like__ it. Seeing side projects through the lense of "value" is naive in my opinion. Yes, obviously if the side project has actual users than that's a plus. But companies like seeing side projects because it __does__ show that the candidate really likes what they do for a living. Now whether the company is purposefully using that to expect people to work 60 hours a week is a different discussion. And while I'll probably ruffle some feathers by saying this, I'll say it; software is a sport. Very much like a sport, if you stop doing it then you'll get fat and lose your touch. People that work on side projects are constantly honing their craft and because of that they tend to be the best athletes. If I owned a baseball team, I sure as hell want the best. And in my humble opinion, the best are usually __always__ working on getting better at the game. AKA working on side projects ;) EDIT:Just want to clarify; it is WRONG of a company to expect people to work 60 hours a week. Just so we are in the same page. I am NOT condoning that.
  - tootie 4y ago
    Value doesn't need to be monetary. Just having fun is something valuable. I'm saying that 99% of the "side projects" I see are junior devs who think they can't apply for a job without a bunch of things on GitHub.
  - tootie 4y ago
    Just to clarify myself also, I don't expect people to dedicate their personal hours to work. We have a standard work week of 35 hours at my company and we generally stick to that. I'm talking about people I have worked with that had successfully side projects that were earning them money and that they most definitely worked on during business hours and were basically just double-dipping.
tpoacher 4y ago
then you should specify this in your job requirements so that people can remove them from their resume when applying. the candidate should not be penalised for trying to tick boxes that other people have set up. I got rejected from positions because I had a masters in computer science instead of an ECDL certificate. So I swallowed my pride and went and got one. Now, I'd agree with you that as an actual computer scientist, mentioning ECDL on my resume is embarrasing. But there you go, some HR departments have weird automated checklists, so I leave it in. I'd hate to then apply to someone like you who'd reject me because I had the nerve to list my ECDL certificate on my resume. It's a lose lose situation for everyone involved.
joeax 4y ago
That's funny, because I've always felt the opposite when evaluating candidates. If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement. Certs are not the end all/be all but they help round our your knowledge and open your eyes to things you never knew. As far as side-projects and open source contributions, this is a two way street. When I look at side projects, I look for how well you are utilizing best practices in your code. If it's a sloppy, poorly documented mess it doesn't look favorably for you. If you use your side projects as a marketing tool they should be well-polished.
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  > If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement. Or it signals that the candidate would rather learn hands-on than take useless multiple choice tests.
_8j50 4y ago
[flagged]
- abeyer 4y ago
  Your frustration is at least understandable, but personal attacks because you disagree with someone's hiring process are not appropriate, not helpful, and just going to make it even harder for you to get hired if anyone in a decision making role sees them. I'll also echo what others have said, in that certs are commonly used by people trying to compensate for a lack of actual skills. That's not always true, but it is often enough that the correlation is bound to stick in people's minds even if they don't explicitly exclude applicants because of it. If you do have both a lot of certs _and_ solid skills and experience, then kudos -- but you may want to consider tailoring resumes and other materials to the jobs you apply to based on their applicability and expected reception. (That's generally good advice for anything, but particularly for things like this that could have both positive or negative connotations in different circumstances.)
  - _8j50 4y ago
    You misunderstand, I have no problem getting hired but I know how hard it was to even get a call at first because of jerks like the person I was commenting to. I normally would agree that a personal attack isn't warranted but what they said is worthy of one. They are affecting people's lives based on bullshit correlations and instinct? And they work in tech? Really, my remarks should be taken as a response to their demonstrated character not their hiring process. Correlation is not causation, anyone near a technical field should know that. If 90% of applicants are shitty then of course most of them that get screen based on resume to begin with will have certs. It is one thing to say "I don't care about certs" this person is saying "I disqualify people if they have certs" does he do that with degrees too? Plenty of crappy degrees folks in any field! How shall I respond to a person punishing people for working hard and trying to demonstrate their knowledge? Deciding peoples livelihood based in his or her laziness to pick up a phone and ask questions? On second thought maybe my words were too harsh for HN. I just don't know a polite way of responding to this. And on the other end of the spectrum there is another ass that says you are shy of one cert, 10 is not enough. We need a guy with this particular cert. or they use this shit to mask their prejudice and find a way to keep people out that aren't part of their country club. It is categorically unfair and the intent is at best based on laziness. If people are getting certs then why is hiring manager not smart enough to ask challenging practical questions and measure their thinking process? And then they brag about it.
deleted 4y ago
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bawolff 4y ago

I have also seen this. A large number of certs on a resume (more than 4) is the most consistent negative signal i have seen. I assume part of the reason is that certs are expensive and not well respected, so the only reason you would get them is if you had no other options.

grepfru_it 4y ago
Is this recent? I held every cert under the sun in the 2000s and companies GOBBLED ME UP. In the early 2010s I could walk into companies by simply having a VCP cert. I'm sure if I held a K8s or some hashicorp cert, or AWS or Azure certs I would be pulled into any org hiring today. And I put all of my certs on my resume (that I can fit with most recent first). I should also clarify, I only put certs that matter (why put an Azure cert on a resume submission to an AWS shop) and certs that are recent (I have 20 years on my resume, why would i put my CCNA on there). I think a large number of irrelevant certs would be a negative signal. I think a large number of relevant certs AND job history to back them up would be a super strong signal.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Idk, i haven't been in the industry long enough to compare. Also, i work in security (in north america and not gov), maybe other areas are more pro-cert.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    I also disagree with your first comment. Large amounts of difficult certs have never been a negative signal and I’ve been doing this for like 20 years. Especially in cyber security where a wide breadth of various knowledge is needed, certs can really help show who has the ”full-stack” so to speak. That being said, 20+ CompTIA cents isn’t going to move the needle for me. I say all that to say “it depends on the cert”
    - bawolff 4y ago
      I think that's fair. I more saw it as the 20+ comptia certs.
    - evgen 4y ago
      Actually cyber security is one area where a lot of certs are a strong negative signal. They basically broadcast course-taking and cert-chasing over real world experience. If you have an OSCP cert I will treat that as a potentially good signal, but if your CV includes CISSP I will walk in to an interview with low expectations and if it has CEH or similar wastes of time the recruiting lead would have known to filter the CV out so that I do not even see it. This if for FAANG environments though, so maybe if you are aiming for a corporate cube farm in a smaller market other certs will be useful. Just not with me.
      - 0xBDB 4y ago
        As a Red Team manager with both the OSCP and CISSP, in my opinion neither is worthless but they are oversold and they aren't really comparable. The CISSP is a risk management cert that's sometimes oversold as an infosec cert. It's been quite useful to me in dealing with the (Fortune 1000 mostly) bureaucracies that take Red Team and pen test findings and turn them into remediations or risk acceptances. The OSCP is a technical cert that's oversold in a different way: because the test is fairly difficult, lots of people assume it's an advanced cert. It's a beginner cert (and Offensive Security has several more you can take after it). What it does prove is that you probably have the right mindset to be a penetration tester (which is not necessarily the same mindset you need for Red Teaming, i.e., unannounced adversarial simulation). tl;dr: I don't think any cert is bad as long as everybody understands what it's for. But I'm one of those people who collects them (at employer expense) as a way to structure my learning, and then never renews them.
- native_samples 4y ago
  I remember many years ago, Google internally knew that one of the only signals obtainable from CVs was the negative signal from number of certs. I don't think this knowledge was actually used for anything, it was just a correlation, but yeah it's sort of an open secret in the business that the sort of people who get lots of certifications do very badly when asked to demonstrate actual technical skills.
- BossingAround 4y ago
  It's a response to large number of people who know very little and want to compensate with memorizing stuff and passing certificates without deeper understanding of what they're doing. It's kind of a stupid response, especially considering that the same people would most likely view 10+ certs on your CV as a positive if your name is western-sounding...
wyclif 4y ago
I'm interested in an informed discussion of a comparison of the merits of the differing tech certs, not so much talking about scuba, finance, or truck driving. How does the quality and value of, say, CompTIA, Cisco, AWS, OSCP, K8s, Linux+ and other certs compare with each other?
yourapostasy 4y ago
I'm enough of a domain expert in certain niches that I've participated in creating certification exams. The reason it can develop into a negative signal: the question banks are rapidly exhausted by the exam dump industry, and for even some esoteric exams 90%+ of the question bank with exactly correct answers are generated within a year of the exam's introduction. With the popular exams, it is mind-numbingly fast. Think days to weeks. Crowdsourcing / MTurking the question banks is depressingly effective if you sweated over nearly a thousand question bank items for a few months with a few other expensive experts. Labs in the exams are a way to blunt this, but I think the exam dump industry has probably come up with a way to defeat labs as well by now, because the labs run a fixed set of scenarios with variations in parameters but not the general gist. It's better, but still hackable. What I've come up with requires discipline by a team documenting the issues they've fixed in the past, but it is so far 100% foolproof. Pick a random relatively self-contained issue your team fixed in the past; this is the most critical step governing the quality of this technique's results. Reproduce the issue in a scratch environment. Sit down the candidate in front of a workstation set up to their preferences you gathered in advance, with all the tooling they prefer, simplifying your superfluous environment specifics where possible (like logging them into various accounts ahead of time). Set their expectations ahead of time that they will be team / pair troubleshooting for half an hour, that you aren't evaluating whether they find the root cause or not, you're evaluating how well they work with others troubleshooting an issue in some system/language/etc. they claim they are a domain expert in. Dive in. Without fail, the ones who exam dumped their way to a certification will thrash about. Hard. Most common is they will not know where to even start, deer-in-the-headlights. Even telling the candidate straight out where to start, by using your 20/20 hindsight and artificially picking a starting point 1-2 steps away from the root cause still does not unlock them; jumping to a known good starting point is useful for the experienced candidates who freeze under interview pressure, as they usually unfreeze when given such a big head start from your IRL issue that you ran into for the first time. You can often get a good gauge of how much and how deeply the candidate worked with the stack they claim competency in by how they navigate around, ask questions, probe for error messages, etc.

csydas 4y ago

I wouldn't dismiss certs that fast as from my experience hiring for technical roles, it's a wash. I've had people with more certs than braincells, and people with certs that I loved and wanted on my team immediately. It at least gave me something to talk about more directly because I can have some expectation on tech they've worked with. I personally don't chase certs for myself because I don't see the point, but I find them as fairly okay talking points on a CV. And it's hard to argue any interview unfairness since the cert should imply certain levels of familiarity with a technology. Edit: I do need to add that the cert concern was a real thing in our company but after some analysis, we sadly found some biases from the interviewers as they only considered certs for certain candidates to be a negative signal. I put a stop to that fast reminding people of candidates from more western countries with gobs of certs, and they legit didn't know their ass from their head, much less how to do anything besides press the button the manual said to press.

btown 4y ago
To this point, occasionally you'll come across candidates who have obtained certs in part because that is the way they were trained to learn in their specific personal & cultural context - but the reason why they chose to learn so much in the first place? It might be indicative of a true, passionate, focus-seeking curiosity that would make them a fantastic team member. And perhaps they hadn't had the opportunity to work in a place that treats learning and growth as a holistic part of the job. These people can become culture carriers in a tremendously positive way. It's part of the reason I try to make "cover paragraphs" (not necessarily full cover letters) an important part of every application - it's important to give people the opportunity to let their passion shine through at the earliest parts of a process.
- csydas 4y ago
  I get what you're saying and I think this is true for a lot of people, but hear me out. I actually rarely read too deeply into the CV except as a source for some talking points. I have a phenomenal recruitment team so I rarely need to "guess" on a candidate from a CV (truly, they are exceptional and they really get what my team is looking for and our candidates love them also cause the recruiters took a lot of time to learn enough to talk competently about our tech scope) If my recruiters pass me a candidate, the candidate is at least good enough to bullshit fairly competently. We structure our interviews to be very conversational -- the same points are always hit and we have a loose grading structure, but mostly the goal is to get the candidates to talk about problems and explain their thoughts really well. I do feel bad, because I can tell some put a ton of effort into their CV, but I rarely pay that much attention to it besides ctrl+f for some subjects I want to talk about or looking for a few keywords outside of our core competencies just to see how they talk about these edge cases. Passion is good, but for me, passion shines through during the interview and the conversation and how they love to talk about what they work on. Even with the most nervous candidates, we've taken a lot of time to practice just being approachable and interested, which helps even the shyest candidates really open up. I know I had one candidate pretty recently where they were quite shy (and also interviewing in a second language, not their primary so lots of stress there). It took a little bit, but by the end of the interview, they were blushing red with pride and smiling uncontrollably with how proud of themselves they were for answering really tough questions and scenarios we had for them. (and they knocked it out of the park for a DevOps position, I don't think I've been so happy with a candidate in awhile) I wish we got this for every candidate; their passion gets tapped and just suddenly I see someone gushing about their favorite topic.

javajosh 4y ago

This is also my experience. However, I would say something like Amazon's certifications may be useful if your company has gone all-in on AWS. Amazon (and GCP and Azure) have such a huge variety of offerings, and it's something that Amazon is asserting this person is at least familiar with what these things are and how they fit together, and the trade-offs. On-the-job study is, in general, not going to be good enough to get a comprehensive understanding like that, and a cert course makes a lot of sense. I suppose if there was a reasonably trusted organization that could give the same cert for "front-end javascript", that would be good too, since there would be great value in surveying at least the major features of the current js landscape. (Probably not practical given the breadth and depth and dynamism of the space, plus the ambiguity of selection. And also, not sure what org would or could do this!)

ricksebak 4y ago

> Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff Just FYI that at some companies, collecting certificates is indeed real world stuff. Some companies use it for marketing (“we have the most certifications in the industry”) and some need to to satisfy vendor partner requirements (“AWS Premier Partners are required to have X number of certificates”). It doesn’t seem fair to penalize a candidate just because they did what their company asked for.

noirbot 4y ago
Sure, but my question would be, are you, as the resume writer, more proud of the cert you got via your work or of the work you did at work? I've done cert stuff before as part of my job, but it never rose to the level of being relevant to put on my resume over other things I did. My rule is always to only put something on my resume if I could talk for 2-3 minutes about it in a way that makes me look good/useful. Most of my certs, the only real thing I could say is "I spent 10-30 hours watching videos and then took a test well." I wouldn't really want to work for a company that valued those skills vs. me explaining how I applied the things I learned from the cert.

hijinks 4y ago

as someone in Devops/SRE I hold the same thinking as you. Whenever I see an interview come in loaded with certs, I automatically think they just know how to take tests and study for them. It's almost 100% that they fail the interview because they don't know how to put the learning into real world solutions.

yakak 4y ago
Perhaps they get enough interviews where the cert is accepted that it isn't worth their time to review these technologies ahead of interviews.
bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
I find this take funny. My past company had a huge pile of credits for certs because they valued them and I figured “I’ve been working with AWS; why not?” I didn’t study or prepare at all and went in using only the hands-on knowledge I picked up over my career. I came out with all the associate certs, the AWS solutions architect pro, and their network specialty. As a hiring manager I find certs to be a neutral indicator: you at least have to know the material to get them, but plenty of people learn the material hands-on, not from books.
- 988747 4y ago
  Also, sometimes companies will force employees to get certified for many reasons. My own company was recently looking to renew their Gold Partnership with Microsoft and so they were looking for victims to get Microsoft certified, because, apparently, that's the requirement for partnership. As for why companies need such partnership: it speaks well to managerial types, therefore helps win contracts.

dilDDoS 4y ago

> do real-world stuff instead of wasting time on artificial tests that require memorization Interesting, since the majority of tech interviews (from what I’ve gathered) rely on artificial tests that require memorization. I’m not disagreeing, I also think real world experience is infinitely more valuable. But it seems like certs could actually be an indicator that a candidate would perform quite well in LC style interviews.

noirbot 4y ago
It's a bit glib to say that even the most leetcode interviews "require memorization". It's certainly possible to do most of them from "memorized" first principles of how various bits of CS components work instead of brute-force memorizing, and in general even when I do code problems on interviews, I mostly try to use them to either demonstrate that or determine that the candidate actually understands WHY you would do things that way. Certs on the other hand are often just pure memorization. There's not really any way to "infer" which AWS service name matches to which service function. You either know the name of the API call or you don't. It doesn't provide much signal that you actually know how to apply that information to anything practical. Even at their worst, most crappy whiteboard code interviews are still literally testing if you can literally write functional code, which is closer to what you do on the job than memorizing the Cisco books.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago

Be careful about the bias in single-metric gatekeeping strategies like this. Contributing to open source projects, having side projects, et al are pursuits of leisure. Certificates are possibly the only foot in the door for folks working multiple jobs with kids, etc. and the government often pays the tuition for low income folks. Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so. I know it’s tough to have to whittle down a list of candidates on paper, but the closer you are to judging a person’s path rather than their capability, the more likely you’ll be to favor people who mirror your cultural identity and experiences. So if someone looks like they’ve got the requisite skills. It certainly doesn’t mean everybody with a pile of certs is worth considering, but it’s probably not a good immediate disqualifier.

bawolff 4y ago
> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right? Not necccesarily. Depending on the cert and field it may make sense to. The goal of getting the cert should be to learn skills. If you've done that, the piece of paper doesn't matter. > Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so The people with all the certs still got interviewed where i worked last, it was just a consistent pattern that they bombed the interview, usually very badly on very basic questions.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  If you've got a few certs and two jobs under your belt that you got because of those certs, how would anyone imagine that those certs would prevent them from getting jobs? For people with traditional industry on-ramping, it might seem intuitive that someone would want to hide these certs from people for their lack of prestige. To others, hiding your only officially-recognized qualifications seems absolutely ridiculous.

dtjb 4y ago

>Your time is better spent working on side projects This seems like a shaky assumption. Keep in mind that many companies, like mine, sponsor or even mandate the certification process. Meaning the justification, time, and costs didn't come from the candidate you're dismissing.

johnchristopher 4y ago

I don't see how writing a blog post is superior to a CCNA/CCNP lab test but okay (ACTUALLY NO, IT'S NOT OKAY).

tootie 4y ago

I consider side projects to be absolutely meaningless predictors of anything. A cert is a poor substitute for experience but it's a signal of someone willing to learn and grow through diligence. Side projects are usually just arbitrary in value. In the very rare case that someone has a real blockbuster side project with a lot of users I'd be concerned about how much time they'd spend on it. Getting a PR approved on a mainstream project would be impressive though.

creativeCak3 4y ago
Nice try, manager ;) We work on side projects because we __like__ it. Seeing side projects through the lense of "value" is naive in my opinion. Yes, obviously if the side project has actual users than that's a plus. But companies like seeing side projects because it __does__ show that the candidate really likes what they do for a living. Now whether the company is purposefully using that to expect people to work 60 hours a week is a different discussion. And while I'll probably ruffle some feathers by saying this, I'll say it; software is a sport. Very much like a sport, if you stop doing it then you'll get fat and lose your touch. People that work on side projects are constantly honing their craft and because of that they tend to be the best athletes. If I owned a baseball team, I sure as hell want the best. And in my humble opinion, the best are usually __always__ working on getting better at the game. AKA working on side projects ;) EDIT:Just want to clarify; it is WRONG of a company to expect people to work 60 hours a week. Just so we are in the same page. I am NOT condoning that.
- tootie 4y ago
  Value doesn't need to be monetary. Just having fun is something valuable. I'm saying that 99% of the "side projects" I see are junior devs who think they can't apply for a job without a bunch of things on GitHub.
- tootie 4y ago
  Just to clarify myself also, I don't expect people to dedicate their personal hours to work. We have a standard work week of 35 hours at my company and we generally stick to that. I'm talking about people I have worked with that had successfully side projects that were earning them money and that they most definitely worked on during business hours and were basically just double-dipping.

tpoacher 4y ago

then you should specify this in your job requirements so that people can remove them from their resume when applying. the candidate should not be penalised for trying to tick boxes that other people have set up. I got rejected from positions because I had a masters in computer science instead of an ECDL certificate. So I swallowed my pride and went and got one. Now, I'd agree with you that as an actual computer scientist, mentioning ECDL on my resume is embarrasing. But there you go, some HR departments have weird automated checklists, so I leave it in. I'd hate to then apply to someone like you who'd reject me because I had the nerve to list my ECDL certificate on my resume. It's a lose lose situation for everyone involved.

joeax 4y ago

That's funny, because I've always felt the opposite when evaluating candidates. If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement. Certs are not the end all/be all but they help round our your knowledge and open your eyes to things you never knew. As far as side-projects and open source contributions, this is a two way street. When I look at side projects, I look for how well you are utilizing best practices in your code. If it's a sloppy, poorly documented mess it doesn't look favorably for you. If you use your side projects as a marketing tool they should be well-polished.

jasonladuke0311 4y ago
> If a candidate comes in saying certs are "trash" and "pointless" it usually looks less favorable. It signals an unwilling to learn and/or strive for continuous improvement. Or it signals that the candidate would rather learn hands-on than take useless multiple choice tests.

_8j50 4y ago

[flagged]

abeyer 4y ago
Your frustration is at least understandable, but personal attacks because you disagree with someone's hiring process are not appropriate, not helpful, and just going to make it even harder for you to get hired if anyone in a decision making role sees them. I'll also echo what others have said, in that certs are commonly used by people trying to compensate for a lack of actual skills. That's not always true, but it is often enough that the correlation is bound to stick in people's minds even if they don't explicitly exclude applicants because of it. If you do have both a lot of certs _and_ solid skills and experience, then kudos -- but you may want to consider tailoring resumes and other materials to the jobs you apply to based on their applicability and expected reception. (That's generally good advice for anything, but particularly for things like this that could have both positive or negative connotations in different circumstances.)
- _8j50 4y ago
  You misunderstand, I have no problem getting hired but I know how hard it was to even get a call at first because of jerks like the person I was commenting to. I normally would agree that a personal attack isn't warranted but what they said is worthy of one. They are affecting people's lives based on bullshit correlations and instinct? And they work in tech? Really, my remarks should be taken as a response to their demonstrated character not their hiring process. Correlation is not causation, anyone near a technical field should know that. If 90% of applicants are shitty then of course most of them that get screen based on resume to begin with will have certs. It is one thing to say "I don't care about certs" this person is saying "I disqualify people if they have certs" does he do that with degrees too? Plenty of crappy degrees folks in any field! How shall I respond to a person punishing people for working hard and trying to demonstrate their knowledge? Deciding peoples livelihood based in his or her laziness to pick up a phone and ask questions? On second thought maybe my words were too harsh for HN. I just don't know a polite way of responding to this. And on the other end of the spectrum there is another ass that says you are shy of one cert, 10 is not enough. We need a guy with this particular cert. or they use this shit to mask their prejudice and find a way to keep people out that aren't part of their country club. It is categorically unfair and the intent is at best based on laziness. If people are getting certs then why is hiring manager not smart enough to ask challenging practical questions and measure their thinking process? And then they brag about it.

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