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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I think you're seeing non-existing intent. This seems like a straightforward way to monetize their acquisition without affecting the users (with paywalls or what not). Certifications are a gold mine for enterprise.

Also, I have yet to meet people taking certifications seriously on an individual level. The sole way I've seen them used is box-checking when choosing a contractor/vendor. Anyone got a different experience?

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This seems like a very narrow view. I don't know where you live but in Asian countries, people care about certificates too much. It's also often used as a way to filter poor people without directly discriminating because certification costs time and money.

Serious question: In which Asian countries is it a problem to directly discriminate?

What type of discrimination?

In SEA I see "Male Only" on programmer jobs not that infrequently, plus very often age requirements explicitly stated for all sorts of jobs.

> age requirements

I'm curious: minimum or maximum?

Maximum, I saw a couple the other day -- 33 and 45. As a 32 year old I didn't feel too encouraged by that!

Personally I've found certifications are a good way to show you're good at passing certifications, and nothing else.

I have nothing against people who show up with their resumes filled with them, but it's not a valuable indicator in my opinion. I'd rather see what they've built. Show me some useful things on your github or blog. That I can see value in.

Obviously we're talking about software-related certs, not pilots licenses, etc...

When recruiting, I usually take certifications as a token of the lack of skills rather than a demonstration of skills

Exactly. If someone wants to demonstrate that they can use Github the best way is for their personal Github to be full of well-structured projects.

This gets repeated every time, but it's worth repeating: You've just discounted many skilled people working at companies which don't allow public personal projects, and people who are not interested in working on personal projects. There's a significant number of them.

I should rephrase -- having stuff in your Github is the best way to show you know your way around Github.

Not discounting the fact that you may have lots of other skills and nothing in your Github.

In general if someone has enough other skills and worked at companies that have a high bar, it's likely they can pick up Github fast enough even if they haven't used it that it shouldn't be a hiring concern.

Like for example, if someone is fluent in C++ or some such, I wouldn't doubt their ability to learn how to use git.

What if you have both certifications and skills?

> Personally I've found certifications are a good way to show you're good at passing certifications, and nothing else.

Some are good. I did AWS Solution Architect Pro, and this one was tough, one needs years of hands on to pass. Anyone with this one will get an instant plus in my book. I did not bother renewing it though, after 3yrs expired :)

I spent some time last year getting some "beginner" AWS certifications and those are definitely worth it; I spent a few dozen hours following online courses (A Cloud Guru is pretty good, and if you have the time you only need to subscribe for a month or so) and feel like I went from superficial knowledge (like sorta knowing what AWS, EC2, RDS etc are) to having err, certified superficial knowledge. TL;DR I know more about AWS now without actually having worked in it.

That said, I wouldn't go for any of the other certifications without actually working / having worked professionally in AWS. Or anything you can get certified for, for that matter.

I mean iirc I've got some cisco certifications as well but I and everyone else cheated on the exam and don't remember anything of it.

Being difficult != good. It can take years to prep and pass a CCIE as well but it’s not really a good indicator of being a good network engineer, despite the esoteric protocol details you have to memorize.

> Being difficult != good.

I did not say that. I said some are good, and named one.

We'd have to review the contenu to be sure, but my initial reaction was the same as @breakingcups. That would fit with a push against gitlab's devops strategy, amongst other things ?

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