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Comment by blm | Hacker News Reader

I dont think you understand what it is like in some job markets. Once you are in an industry you might be able to sustain a career without certifications but how is someone supposed to break into an area when people only hire candidates with "experience" or certifications? Certifications were proof that you got off your ass and learnt and passed an exam. People that hire do not trust resumes anymore because candidates can put anything in a resume to make them sound good. You could construct a lab at home and write about your learning activities but in my experience no one trust such "evidence" since people can just copy and paste other peoples work.

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> candidates can put anything in a resume to make them sound good

This is true.

However it's not like Certification is a good measure for competency or skill, either.

A lot of the big name certs have major issues with either being passable via brain-dumps, and/or they test for bad and outdated practices.

Certifications are unfortunately a contraindication to competency and skill.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and hold several certifications, so I have a clear conflict of interest here

I agree with your analysis there regarding outdated and passable via brain-dumps, which is why I both respect and pursue Red Hat certs (before I went to work there). They are damn hard and there's no way to pass them unless you have practiced your ass off. The cert transcripts also specify exactly which version of the tech you took your exam on (e.g. RHEL 7 or Ansible v2.7), so an employer can see if your skills are outdated. IME they are well respected in the industry.

No test or cert if perfect of course, but they're not all equal IMHO.

Some certs like A+ are a game to get the candidate to memorize useless, obscure trivia that is found in someone's test prep materials.

The exploitative training/testing racket is all about creating a subscription-like dependency with planned obsolescence to get steady, easy money for more testing and more exams.

Thank the various gods for, back in the day: TestKing.

Good certifications which can be used in certain safety-critical tech jobs include the US state-by-state Professional Engineer license with a brutal and comprehensive exam process plus required work experience.

In general, better exams are free-form responses and/or a panel interview (if they still do that) like CCIE.

Yup.

My boss had an MCSE but could only operate a Windows desktop as a power user and install Windows (server). He got this cert because of the "bootcamp" where they only taught to the tests and then they took the tests until they passed them.

Meanwhile, I was deploying GPOs and scripting remote cleanups of Blaster using PsExec... zero certs and no degree.

A+ is the mark of the beast and the coming of the second-stringer.

Get an A+ certification and see how far you get. :)

I could be wrong, but you come across to me on the negative-side, like cognitive distortions or inexperience. "Some job markets" being what specifically? Game dev, for example, the most sure path to that is more general experience before and willingness to work as an unpaid intern/code janitor prior to getting a paid position.

"How": That's your responsibility to use your imagination to figure out. No one else can or should think for you or do what you need to do because then you won't internalize independence or gain self-confidence to be more capable.

I've been a hiring manager on occasion. Resumes are an advertisement that must be proven fact-checking the candidate that the can demonstrate further knowledge and calling references. Resumes are often moot in rapid-pace technology fields where demonstration of specific, current knowledge is more important.. they are only good if they can be used as advertisements to get the attention of a company and/or get attention of different decision-makers within that company.

A home lab is useful for gaining knowledge that may be tested in an interview... like how to construct an HA MySQL or Postgres cluster that can failover itself, move the vIP and prevent split-brain. Or machine learning.

In general, I had zero family, friends or legacy connections for the following to demonstrate :

At 15, I went to interesting talks and colloquia just for the heck of it, and asked questions. At one of them, I was offered a job as a dark matter physics research assistant at IBM Almaden but couldn't take it for legal reasons (15 ½ legal minimum). I was disappointed, but moved forward.

At 16, I got a pizza flipping/cashier job with zero experience because no one else was hiring (it was a recession and there lots of potential workers). Definitely a sh*t job but a job nonetheless. I had to break down every business door in the area and it was rejection almost every time, except when it wasn't.

At 17, I moved to a job in retail software sales with only one crap job on my resume by again banging-down every door to every business for 2 miles down a main road.

At 18, I started a sysadmin consultancy and built it up to 4 clients within a single building for convenience. I was doing sysadmin, netadmin and ported a Fortran nuclear reactor simulator from UNIX to Win32 and made it run 2.5x faster by disabling swap. Also, added a Cisco 1604 128 KiB ISDN router and discovered AIX was phoning home to IBM, keeping the router always demand-dialing... nothing a little /etc/hosts couldn't fix.

About 19, I took a crap-ton of (then cheap) community college classes, 5-7 at a time, and did a Transfer Admission Agreement to guaranty admission to a decent school while working almost full-time.

21, transferred to the uni and took 4 CS quarter-system classes at time. It's even more fun with a concrete math class where proofs are pages and pages. 3-4 all-nighters a week for months at a time.

At 25, I hit pause on uni and got a full-time Lead SysAdmin job at (top 5 university name) without a degree and zero certifications. They gave me all sorts of training/certs that were of mostly limited value and no importance but gave my boss an excuse to put us up in Hollywood, rent a Jag and personal-cost road-trip to Vegas on Friday. Remote-site VMware VCP training cost $10k back then, I bet it's $15-18k now... and the tests cost $3k+ now IIRC.

At 27, I moved to a biomedical informatics department doing High Performance Computing (HPC) and what would be considered now more like SRE.

A couple of years later, I bounced to finish the degree and go into enterprise consulting.

At 31, I did on-premises, generalist (SRE-like) integration and migrations at an AWS preferred partner for Fortune 200.

At 32, I delved in the startup scene, mostly earlier YC batch folks and did a smattering of consulting gigs, getting paid $10k/week. (It's best at that point to have an LLC.) In general, hang around the right coffee shops, and meeting potential clients is inevitable.

----

Here are some preparatory elements to consider:

- Put useful things on Github and/or Youtube/Vimeo.

- Scrub social media clean or close them.

- LinkedIn is essential for legacy organizations.

- Have a resume in PDF & DOCX formats.

- Have a personal site that has limited details, links to professional social sites and a captcha'ed contact form.

- Carry personal cards with email (containing name), phone number with +country code and timezone, and a QR barcode that's the vCard.

- Cultivate a pleasant, no complaints, always on-time, always deliver, can-do/will-figure-it-out attitude.

- Make them tell you "no," because never asking is a definite "no."

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