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How good are the certificates though in assessing actual skill vs test taking ability?

As very anecdotally, I know one person with an Amazon cert and they are also someone who wants me to tell them which line numbers of their code to edit for assignments. And they got it by cramming for the exam like any other test. So my thoughts on Developer Associate are not very high.

Other developers have told me that one of the easiest ways to get a cert is to just pay someone in India to take the test for you in case you need it for a contract (for those developers in the consulting world).

Both being able to cram for it and it being required as part of crappy contracts but not genuinely mattering if the people doing the work did it seem like very negative signals about its value.

> How good are the certificates though in assessing actual skill vs test taking ability?

That would depend on the cert and the level of experience of a given candidate.

> As very anecdotally, I know one person with an Amazon cert and they are also someone who wants me to tell them which line numbers of their code to edit for assignments. And they got it by cramming for the exam like any other test. So my thoughts on Developer Associate are not very high.

Obviously, that is more of a reflection on that person's personality and less on them having a cert. Not everyone with a cert is like that.

> Other developers have told me that one of the easiest ways to get a cert is to just pay someone in India to take the test for you in case you need it for a contract (for those developers in the consulting world)

That's a culture problem, not a cert problem. Some people get certs to honestly learn and signal that knowledge to others, not just to tick a check box or add a resume bullet point.

Yeesh. SMH.

How do you read that anecdote and still try to defend the cert as useful?

The whole point of any cert is to serve as a proxy for knowing that someone else knows something. You aren't a doctor, and have no way to judge anyone else's fitness to prescribe or perform treatments on you, but they have a diploma that you are assured by everyone you ever met that those are hard to get, especially if you look one level deeper and look at the school name rather than just the fact of a diploma at all.

If you can be useless and still get the cert, then the cert is not only of no positive value, it is of actively negative value, at least in the macro scale for everyone as a whole.

It can obviously be of positive value to an individual as a game move within a disfunctional game.

But that just comes at the expense of everyone else, like capitolizing on some tax loophole or something instead of seeking to close it.

> How do you read that anecdote and still try to defend the cert as useful?

A couple of reasons:

1. It's a weak anecdote 2. Anecdotes are not statistically proven facts 3. I have anecdotes from my life that demonstrates the exact opposite

I do not know how you read an anecdote, on the internet of all places, and take it seriously.

>That's a culture problem, not a cert problem. Some people get certs to honestly learn and signal that knowledge to others, not just to tick a check box or add a resume bullet point.

But certs cannot be isolated from culture, which undermines their value.

> How good are the certificates though in assessing actual skill vs test taking ability?

I am a consultant at AWS, I have eight (soon nine) certifications I work with many industry experts. I would say they aren’t good at all at assessing someone’s skill. At most if you take them seriously and go beyond the crash courses they help you be conversant on the services at the high level and on areas that you already know they may help fill in knowledge gaps. My entire purpose of getting the certs was to know what s

For every single service I’ve had to use with AWS, I’ve had to dig into the documentation, the APIs, blog posts, Udemy courses for AWS’s managed versions of open source software like ElasticSearch, etc.

It’s way too easy to get certifications without any experience.

The best thing you can do to understand the value of a certification is get it yourself.

There is a popular opinion that having a certificate doesn't necessarily means that you have knowledge. And that certainly doesn't mean that all certified people don't have knowledge. That also doesn't mean that there aren't any reputable certifications. But there are many bad certification programs.

Nobody is against training and that's why companies still encourage juniors to take training and even some certifications. But some certifications aren't really designed to be a good training. Just go on internet and see how people are seeking for tips and tricks to handle the exam itself and also check study materials and you will understand where that opinion is coming from.

Of course now I have to apply a standard disclaimer. In my other comments, I hopefully tried not to make them AWS specific and lumped AWS, Azure and GCP together. I do work for AWS as a consultant. But I mostly do custom development. I don’t deal with networking infrastructure outside of my own projects that I deliver to customers. All opinions are my own.

I have eight and soon nine AWS certifications I’ve only ever paid for one out of pocket. The companies I worked for paid for the rest. But I would say that the certifications prove nothing as far whether you are proficient in the certain skillset.

I got my first certification without ever logging into the console. The only reason I got any of the certs (besides the 7th one that was required when I was hired at AWS ProServe) was to have a guided learning path with a goal at the end. The most they do is let you know what you don’t know and the “what” but not the “how”. I am consistently disappointed about how easy the certifications are compared to what I really need to know on the job.

How can you get a developers certification from AWS and not know the first thing about development? How can you get a database certification and not know any of the query languages involved? I needed to learn about ElasticSearch a couple of years ago for a project. I bought a course from Udemy that was 20 hours long to learn the ends and outs of it and they even admitted glossing over some advanced parts.

You can take a 14 hour course in AWS Data Analytics and pass the course. The exam consists of Redshift (an OLAP database), ElasticSearch, various Apache frameworks (Hive, Presto, Spark, Hadoop, HBase, HUE, etc.), Kinesis (stream processing), Glue (Serverless PySpark infrastructure) and a few other services. Do you think that certification would qualify anyone to actually implement any project on AWS? Should I have hired someone based on the certification when I was in the real world?

While I disagree with all of the posters who say stuff like because the used Digital Ocean for their Todo app that they “know AWS”, I would hire a developer with no AWS experience before I would hire someone with an AWS Developers certification with no development experience. The same is true for all of the other specialities - Databases, Data Analytics, ML/AI, etc.

Except for infrastructure and networking. I’ve seen far too many on prem network folks who got one certification and called themselves “consultants” and ended up costing the company more because they didn’t know how to leverage services being offered.

Certificates are not bad, but it seems to me that you only get a general idea of AWS landscape, and minimal hands on experience.

You actually need practical experience with using any of their services in production, to figure out capabilities/limitations/warts/etc.

Some cert learning platforms do that. They aren’t fools. The ones who care about learning provide you with sandboxes where you need to create different environments and they validate your work. Do some shopping beforehand and see which platforms have sandboxes for learning specifics.

I learned through LinuxAcademy.com (dunno if it exists in the same form anymore).

I was hired to help a group of linux admin seniors who knew a ton about their work, but had pretty terrible AWS knowledge. After 2 weeks (!) I was able to improve architecture of our environments enough that I made thousands in savings per month and make our product more resilient at the same time.

All this gain just because they hired someone who learned how and why to so things through a good cert course. Instead of using the platform as a pure KVM alternative I showed them the APIs that make things easier for us.

So much this. I love pursuing certifications but it’s not like I have some grandeur belief that it makes you better than anyone. I find them to be a useful tool for learning something new.

It's when you advertise that you have them or put them on your resume that they become a negative signal to a lot of teams.

Basically everyone has the experiencing how little junior devs know right out of college but don't seem to want to apply this logic to certs. "I took a class on AWS in college" is about the equivalent of a cert and if that's the best you can put on your resume it doesn't look great.

It’s relative really. This may or may not be your opinion but it is a cynical one at best. It shows a lot of immaturity. Again I am not attacking you.

When I am hiring someone and I see they have certifications that means they put in extra effort. It’s not a substitute for experience by any means but there is some foundational knowledge that comes with it.

The certifications are not easy and do require studying and actual experience in the AWS ecosystem.

If a team wants to look down their noses at someone who has a certification then that is a red flag to me as a potential hire. I probably wouldn’t want to work with people like that anyway.

I will continue to put certifications on my resume with pride and if they don’t like it that is on them. I’ll be fine regardless of some unnecessary elitism.

Yes, me too. But I have always been discouraged by seniors.

My employer sponsored my oracle java 8 cert. At the time, I knew zero java, and I was able to convince my boss' boss that it would be a good idea after my boss denied and said it was useless (bc he did not have it and did not want to validate it).

Going through our code base after was eye opening. We were doing a few things wrong or in a non-standard way.

What were some of the anti-patterns you saw?