Ask HN: Did obtaining an AWS Solutions Architect certification help you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did obtaining an AWS Solutions Architect certification help you?

15 pointspachico16 comments

And if it did, was it because of what you learned during the training or because of the certification itself?

I hold the AWS Solution Architect Associate certification. I had a lot of fun studying for the exam, and learned a lot.

However it did not help me one bit in looking for a job. Everyone wanted someone with experience.

My certification expires in November and I'm not going to renew it. I've decided that I'm going to work on getting an advanced VMware certification. There is still a lot of on prem out there, and I have 15 years of experience with VMware. So figure I should leverage that.

Most certifications are a scam in my opinion - if your employer wants you to get one and is paying for it then ok, but I would never spend my own money on a certification. A couple years hands on in an AWS environment and you’ll be an old pro.

Typically you will gain deep, rather than broad, AWS experience from your job because only certain stacks and configurations are used repeatedly.

Self-study and experimentation are viable routes to augment professional experience but some prefer to learn from curricula.

In general, the value of any certification is inversely proportional to how many are awarded. If they are easy to get and lots of people have one (think liberal arts diploma), they're not worth much.

For comparison purposes, you might look at other similar proprietary technical certifications that have been in the marketplace longer --- for example, RHCE or MCSE (now defunct).

Not really sure about that. I know for a fact that many companies ask about just to be able to bypass the interview part about AWS.

The question, if you have the luxury of asking it, is do you want to sign away a big chunk of your life to one of these companies?

Can you elaborate? Why a big chunk of your life?

People often ask me if gaining a certification like the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate is enough to get them a job. The short answer is that an AWS certification alone will not get you a job. There are several other attributes that play an essential part in kick-starting your AWS career. I think it’s also fair to say that AWS certifications are almost prerequisites, rather than differentiators today. Unless you have several AWS certifications, this is usually the case. Everyone seems to have their Solutions Architect Associate certification so that’s not going to make you stand out when applying for an AWS Solution Architect job.

I got mine with very little studying, I happened to already be working within a lot of AWS tooling and knew some general cloud architecture concepts, so in my case it was more of a validation tool.

So far it’s hard to tell if it has helped with anything. I might have gotten a look for an interview with it. But that’s hard to say, companies don’t usually tell you what resume items made them interested.

I would imagine it would make sense to get one if you want to work for Amazon, or maybe another big company that likes certifications. I don’t know that it would help elsewhere.

Try to get your company to pay for it!

What level was it?

I got associate and then professional a couple months later. I studied for neither beyond maybe an hour of looking at what the question formats looked like.

I figured that it was a better use of time to study only if I failed, and then re-take, since there’s no punishment for failure other than cost.

I barely passed professional, but I passed. Associate felt easy for me.

I have about 2-3 years experience working just about 100% within AWS for my job. I would think that both exams would be way harder and require study without so much practical experience.

Maybe an AWS certification could help you if you lack experience in your resume and want to land a cloud engineering role.

Also, if you’re paying yourself, as of a few months ago it seems like Amazon gives you a 50% discount code for your next exam every time you take an exam. In other words, only the first exam is full price. I couldn’t guarantee that this offer sticks around or anything.

Do you use Terraform? I'm just wondering because I interact with AWS 90% (possibly more) via Terraform. I rarely use the AWS Console and have never looked at Cloudformation or eksctl. I wonder if that's gonna make the certification more difficult for me...

Yes I do the same! Almost entirely through Terraform.

In no way does that hurt your knowledge! By doing everything in code you probably understand a lot more to begin with, since you don’t rely on some of the UI crutches and defaults.

Honestly I check the Terraform documentation before I even bother with AWS docs 99% of the time.

The system architect questions are definitely more high level architecture questions that revolve around understanding the AWS products and what trade-offs you make by choosing one of the the other.

Like any other multiple choice test, much of passing the test revolves around general test taking strategies (e.g. reading carefully and eliminating wrong answers)

I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it from the example questions that are out there (Amazon also has a few for free).

Understanding a few things about less commonly encountered products like Kinesis could help, too.

I find certificates help when the person hiring you does not know enough about the topic. As such they use your certificate as a crutch to confirm you know something about the topic. It will also be used by recruiters to sell you, once again to people who do not understand the tech enough to properly evaluate you.

A certification might also get your resume past HR and to the hiring manager.

I don’t have the Solutions Architect certification but I do have the AWS Certified Developer certification. I learned quite a bit during the training and it did help me get a job, though it’s hard to quantify how much as I’ve also been in IT/IS for nearly 15 years which includes 10 years of software development experience. I also get contacted fairly regularly by recruiters who see I have the certification listed on LinkedIn.

Yeah it helped me. I don’t think it really helped me get a job. I think my CV and past experience was taken far more into account than any certifications I listed. However, it helped me to become familiar with some of the aspects of AWS that I didn’t use in my day to day job and also to solidify my understanding of some other areas. I don’t regret studying and passing it especially as it didn’t cost much.

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