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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience hiring and then seeing how people perform over time I've roughly concluded that during screening / interviewing absence of a degree is not a negative signal (can be positive), but presence of certifications has consistently been a strong negative signal.

I know there are a few areas in which they are seemingly unavoidable, i.e. government, military, financial. But if I see certifications on a profile I am interested in and I believe we have a role that matches what the person is looking to do, then I will use the more unscripted part of the interview to go to first principles and test the foundations of CompSci understanding with far fewer buzzwords.

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Certifications were the MOCs of their day. They were good for motivating and organizing your study of a topic. Unfortunately, while MOCs tend to stick to knowledge with proven value, certifications indoctrinate you into the ideas underlying the issuing company's technology, even if it is dubious and unproven. For instance, at the turn of the century, Sun's programming certifications were all about their Java Enterprise ideas that now we're all quite happy to have left behind. I took the Java Certified Web Developer exam way back in 2001 or so, and while it did cover fundamentals of HTTP and cookies and a little bit of the state of web security for the time, most of it was about Sun's ridiculous (in hindsight) web technologies like JSP.

The way the content of the exams came about was, Sun's super smart engineers thought really hard about questions like, "How can we build enterprise-scale software predictably and reliably in the future?" They came up with some ideas that seemed self-evidently true, turned them into a design orthodoxy, built massive technologies and frameworks to enable/enforce them, launched it with a tidal wave of marketing that is hard to imagine now, published hundreds of pounds of books, and created a system of certification exams all before getting enough experience with the technology to realize, "Gosh, we thought this would be a good way to build enterprise systems, but it really isn't." If you got a Java enterprise certification around the year 2000, it largely consisted of indoctrination into ideas that were about to be tossed into the dustbin of history.

At the time, I would have taken any job I got, and getting more Sun certifications like their Enterprise Architect certification (which meant you could explain why EBJ 1 was a really great idea) seemed like a good way to make myself more employable, but luckily for me, shortly after completing the Web Developer certification I got a job unrelated to enterprise Java, and I escaped further investment in that world.

Somewhere in here, there's a general (not-just-computer-science) lesson to be learned about certifications and hierarchies owned by private corporations vs. those owned by the people who work and have a place in them.

When hiring I never look for a degree. Of the dozens of employees over the years in my departments I could not say who had a degree and who hadn't.

anyone doing consulting is pretty much required to do certs. If you want to be a Amazon/Google/Microsoft partner you have to have a pretty high number of certified employees, and you need to be a partner to get most of the work in the field.

cheating is definitely rampant. I find that when trying to find study material for exams, half the search results are exam dumps

Not really my field, so wasn't aware of this. What certs are they typically looking for partners to have?

And I do see it from their point of view: certs are a low-effort (on their part) way to weed out obvious frauds and scam businesses. They're borderline useless, but are at least indicative of effort.

For a company to be a Platinum Partner you'd need so many points, and the points are calculated by looking at how many of your people have which certs. Which certs were needed varied on which company you wanted to partner with. Microsoft and Cisco were the most common I saw.

Some very sharp networking engineers that I've worked with did hold a CCNP or higher certificate. They are not necessarily a bad indicator, but not a sure shot confirmation of ability either.

Too true. If I see MSCE on the bloody thing, it’s to the bin or I’m going to waste my next fifteen minutes

I did an MCSE in the nineties. It helped me round out my knowledge of the Microsoft products I was working with at the time. It also helped me to dig out of a career rut I was stuck in.

This was before all the bootcamps arrived but even then I wouldn't completely dismiss it.

Yea, back in the 90s MCSE was a better investment and was actually a good way to get hired. I know lots of successful IT people today who got their first 'real' IT job thanks to earning their MCSE. Today I don't think they have the same value.

It's not about whether you did the certification or not. The question is, do you put it on your resume?

>The question is, do you put it on your resume?

That isn't really the question because I haven't written a resume since 1992.

That’s the point.

The only good reason I can see for getting those certs is that it's a far easier path to remaining certified as a Microsoft Partner, and that's quite an enormous deal as far as software licenses, Azure credits, MSDN access, and other bennies.

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