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Comment by YawningAngel | Hacker News Reader

Who on earth employs a "solutions architect" whose only qualification is some random certificate that tests AWS trivia?

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.)

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).

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?

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.

So no different than a high-level Cisco, VMware, or Redhat cert.

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.

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.)

Yeah, a serverless certification would be great. These certs are more foundational in scope.

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.

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.

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.

Backwater IT orgs deep in the heart of Texas that have heard that they have to move everything into the cloud?

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.

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.

I agree. Work experience always comes first. Anyone obtaining AWS certs without work experience should be a huge red flag.

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.

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