Ask HN: What are some good certifications for a junior developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some good certifications for a junior developer?

6 pointsCoreSet5 comments

Are there any skill-building programs or certifications out there that you could recommend to a developer at the very beginning of his (post-bootcamp) career? Something that could ideally be done in addition to a part-time or full-time job?Thank you

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There are a lot of skill-building programs out there but you gotta ask yourself first on which 'programming world' you would like to be part of:

Certifications are really good if you really want to build a career into middle-management, in-house software development departments a.k.a. mega-corp widget factories; these types highly appreciate certificates. A big pharmaceutical company would love to see a Microsoft Certificate over a Github profile since they don't care about the code, they just care about you passing a "industry standard test" so that you would fit X number of requirements and feel safe that they got the right person. Couple your certificate with a filled out LinkedIn profile; and they'll highly consider you.

Building a good Github profile/portfolio website is the better route if you want to build your career around working for companies that sell software as their core product, or well-known shops (Fog Creek, 37 signals, etc.). These type of companies highly value code and work output, and they'd understand the value in your profile. Don't get me wrong, a certificate would help in some way but if you can't show them you can code or be comfortable with the command line, they'll go for anyone else who has built something and deployed it.

If you're going for the certifications route, it depends on what stack you're going for:

For anything with Spring, go through springsource.com/training you'll find some links there for certification classes.

For anything .NET or Windows, go through microsoft.com/learning for more info.

Don't underestimate the amount of time and money spent on studying/getting a certification. If you already have a job, don't take a certification unless you really plan on moving up some sort of mega-corp corporate ladder or if you're targeting for another job that requires a certain certification. The better way to be better that has no strict commitments is to find yourself a user-group of your stack, work with a friend on a project you think is 'cool', or work on some open-source project.

The programming world doesn't really work like that. There are a couple of places selling certifications, but they matter so little that it would be a waste of money to get one.

The best thing you can do is build stuff and show it off on a portfolio website or a github profile.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/mcpd-certification.a...

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.ge...

But if you already have a job, you don't need one. They might help you land a job if you don't have a CS degree. Also agree with the other comment: if you are doing JS, etc. then get active in GitHub.

I'd have to agree with the original answer too, In terms of recruitment these days, it seems that agents frequently ask for either github urls or somewhere a client can see your work as in a portfolio. Best thing to do is find something that interests you and then find relevant tech to learn in order to implement it. You'll find that you pick a lot of things up from others you will work with and the way in which projects get set out etc. If you look to create a portfolio site you can also use that as a side project to pick up new tech. I recently started a personal project to create a personal portfolio site boilerplate that is a single page application that is easy for people to modify and make their own [0]. I made it because I needed to get underway with creating a portfolio site and also because it gave me another opportunity at using new things. Also maybe look at contributing to popular OSS because that will get credit too. That's my two cents anyway, hope it helps.

[0] http://jh3y.github.io/pavo

I went to the Epicodus programming bootcamp and got a junior dev level job after without much struggle, but most companies I talked to just wanted to see my github. Make a cool side project. I started writing two books and was contributing to an open source project as well as working freelance making simple static pages/CMS sites to get more stuff in my portfolio. If you want to know some people to talk to, email me. It's in my profile.

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