Amazon Introduces Re:Post, a “Stack Overflow” for AWS

I’ve never paid for one, get your company to pay the fees

Really only applicable at certain kinds of company, leaning on certifications usually means it’s a very bureaucratic company or one with not enough competency to figure out if a candidate is any good.

Likewise if a candidate has a lot of certifications there’s usually a question “does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests “

just another sales tactic like the old MSCE reinvented, nothing has changed

the circle has been reinvented - again!

Lets call it the circle reinvention club or does this already exist?

I have a few certifications.

all AWS certs are paid for by my employer through exam vouchers -- who in turn gets free/discounted exam vouchers from AWS through their partnership either directly or indirectly discounted through partner credits worth hundreds and thousands of dollars of AWS usage that we as an org definitely use up to offset our consumption bills.

I personally never paid a single dollar for AWS cert exam.

I did pay for a few AWS exam prep courses and study resources -- and some of them were reimbursed by my employer.

You don't have to renew all your expired certs if you don't see the need and you have moved on to bigger/different things in your career.

In my experience studying for a cert exam fills in gaps and brings you up to date on best practices and newer features.

I don't believe anyone's job is so broad and deep at the same time that their hands-on experience makes the certification completely redundant.

EDIT:

Here is a person sharing their experience -- he/she may be overdoing it with the number of certs but they are looking at certs as a means to learn more beyond their current job role and look for career growth

https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/ks28yi/7...

If nothing, the knowledge from the certs give you the necessary footing to approach your next project/job with the right mindset in areas your previous experience may not have exposed you to.

I had one of their certifications. It expired a few years back and I don't intend to renew it or acquire a new one. Below position presented to HR or tech hiring people usually works:

"I used to have AWS certification. Amazon even prolonged it from 2 to 3 years but I had no reasons to renew it afterwards. I still work on this stuff and my practical knowledge isn't outdated. I won't remember what pricing tricks every single service has but I'm able to quickly set up or fix things"

Sure, there are businesses that require you to have a shiny, fresh certifications. There are also companies that value their employees' and contractors' ability to choose what is worth doing and what seems to be a waste of time and energy.

I actually appreciate it. I'll often read the article then check the comments for the other viewpoint(s).

There's this mistake people make, especially in tech, where if someone says "X is bad" people think "Wow, they must really know about X". There's tons of 'hot takes' and criticism because it's really easy to look and feel smart when you're the person levying those.

And then the top response to the top response is usually pedantic strawmanning

Because you can't downvote an HN post, and shouldn't downvote when you disagree, so people end up upvoting contrary opinions they agree with. The sequence is usually [Post with a position A] -> top comment (disagrees with position A) -> top child comment (disagrees with top comment, usually focusing a single, least-significant point raised by top comment)

Because if you rate 1 star that is going to their annual performance, it is very stressful job to work at aws support, in an year you would have to be get 4.8 overall rating which is very hard to get because for the most part customers doesn't rate when they had good experience.

You must have not tried to use Outposts when they came out.

Thing the Second:

> Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars

and quoting CactusOnFire > I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam.

I too used to look down on certification.

I made a damn good living "doing computers" (still do): networking, development, what's now called BI reporting, backup and restores, etc. This for multiple startups, SMBs and $BIGCORPs.

I then wanted to get into training: MCSE, SCSA, LPI, etc. For that, I had to be certified. No problem, I thought, certifications are for fools and children; this will be a cake walk.

Great Ghu! There was _so_ _much_ I didn't know or even know about. Certifications filled in _so_ many gaps and minutiae. (You don't know what you don't know.) Not only did it fill in the gaps, allowing me to better utilize the knowledge I already had it let me make more sense of those shapes I see off in the tech horizon.

Now because I have these certs, should you then treat me as if I was the next coming of Ritchie? :-|

Certs show that you have a _base_ knowledge, not that your the reincarnation of Turing.

Are there people who abuse the system? Sure! Name a system involving humans that isn't/hasn't been abused, corrupted, and twisted beyond what it was meant to do. Go ahead. I'll wait.

I've come to the conclusion that people who sht on people (mostly utes [sic]) for getting technical certifications are the same ones who sht on recent high school graduates: Oh, you have a high school diploma? How nice. /s It says here you took English and math classes. Let's see how good you are. Write a 5,000 word dissertation on the impact of Don Quixote on Western literature, then prove Fermat's Last Theorem. If you can't do that in 30 minutes, GTFO you poser.'

What's that? You don't treat ppl with high school diplomas or bachelor/masters' degrees like that? Then why treat people going after certs like that?

> their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. (...) Yes, I have to pay for that support.

My experience is very much the opposite of what you wrote, both with free support and paid Amazon Managed Services. Their support can often be as helpful and truthful as their piece of crap parody of a services health dashboard[1].

> I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile

When your vehicle is under warranty, you've already paid for checks and repairs upfront. Just like you pay for amzn's services. You can buy additional support for your car and cloud stuff, and better private healthcare, but you don't _have_to_ if you've paid for warranty or insurance. Depends of course on use case and what you need: help building stuff or help figuring out why isn't stuff working as you'd like it to. When you want Amazon to simply fix their shit, paying for support smells like an extortion and pushing you to forums will give them more time to not provide fixes.

Therefore I think that the commenter you are responding to is right: Amazon seems to be attempting to acquire free workforce and pushing their customers to "community support" or whatever shitty phrasing they'll use to set up a barrier between a customer and their actual employees. And they do have a long history of exploiting and even destroying their customers (diapers dot com etc).

I believe that the problem Amazon has right now is that they created certification-based business model which was one of factors raising salaries in the sector but they would still like to pay shit and overwork their staff paid in peanuts.

And while I know what salaries can an engineer expect for working for AWS in the US, I don't remember when was the last time I dealt with non-Indian reps.

[1] status.aws.amazon.com

Which well? The well of positivity has been poisoned?

The flip side is that I’ve had such negative experiences with Amazon across all of their services that the people in this thread talking about how wonderful support has been seem like shills.

I think it’s possible to damage your reputation beyond repair, making even ridiculous claims sound plausible.

I read that as a different internal only system for AWS specific things.

Stack Exchange is broader than SO and other sites have other rules.

LibreOffice also runs a Stack Exchange clone, actually a fork of the older open-source SE codebase I believe. It's horrible - no real experts frequent the forums. But the lack of some SE features highlight them. For one, I don't ever see if anyone replied to my questions or left a comment on my answers. I do get an email, but that is easily missed and destroys the ability to have a conversation. Because I'm always checking some site on the SE network for other things, I always see notifications there.

Another missing SE feature is the Hot Network Questions. I used to hate that feature, it would distract me to no end. But now I see how it attracts people to new SE sites that they might have expertise in but otherwise not know about. I do see the need that it fill now.

You can steal ideas to which one doesn’t have a legal right.

The AWS console is designed so that you won’t use it at scale, since the “right way” is through terraform/cloudformation etc. This is the only explanation I have at this point for the lack of basic stuff like visualizations of running infrastructure. “If I were running it”, the console would have an entirely visual mode where you can drag and drop infrastructure that’s fully interoperable with a tabular view. It would allow you to see at a glance what you’re running and what it’s doing and what is costing money. The current manifestation as a bunch of tables listing individual items that have secret cross dependencies is just, so much less than what it could be.

What are some pain points in the Azure one?

You're thinking of Google, not Amazon.

I find AWS documentation to be one of the best out there. Consistent across all their products, very detailed and easy to navigate. I am curious what you found to be lacking in their docs.

they do. the docs are open source and you can propose changes to them

https://github.com/awsdocs

> the boto3 / terraform etc. docs are a better place to find API documentation than AWS

The boto3 documentation is AWS documentation…

They didn't re-invent something either. It's really is a copy-paste from stackoverflow

I agree with your general point about avoiding centralized data, but StackExchange definitely stands as unique since all of its posts are in the creative commons. Due to that, I think SE is one of the few bastions for sharing knowledge since it doesn't own its users answers.

Not saying that SE is the end all be all of QA forums, just that it's a much better centralized system than you are giving it credit.

lol poor guy who launched it slaving for the whole year thinks it will get him promoted. Wait till he goes through a cycle, gets shot down, demoralized, leaves AWS and they backfill with fresh meat.

Cue the circle of life