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Comment by eranation | Hacker News Reader

As a hiring manager, I treat AWS certification (professional especially) as relatively a good heuristic. It does not replace hands-on experience of course, but it has good correlation with good hands-on ability.

Another one that will catch my eye is any Kubernetes certification.

Both are great additions to experience, the certification itself has much less value standalone, but it might be the edge that will help someone get that entry level job.

(These are common for DevOps engineers, but a SWE with the above will have an edge in my book)

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Might the above be generalized into "The best use of certificates is to reduce uncertainty, for the hirer"?

I.e. A SWE with a SWE cert says nothing, because you'd expect them to know it. But a SWE with a DevOps cert says something, versus just claiming knowledge.

I remember someone back in the day - perhaps Microsoft - advertising their certs as “so THEY know that YOU know”.

My impression is that every cert seller markets as though the world believed "You dont know it, unless you're certified in it."

My impression is that the world actually believes "You can be certified in something without knowing it."

So at best, from an applicant / employee's perspective, certificates are a slightly stronger suggestion that you might know the thing you claim to know.

Which is a useless reinforcement for something for which you already have demonstrated experience via work history.

But might be useful for something for which you do not.

Maybe I'm just unlucky but I've come across far to many people who have certs but are utterly useless at their job.

Wow interesting. I got the security specialist one (work wanted me to and they agreed to pay for it). It was almost entirely memorizing what amazon product name corresponds to what generic name. And a bit about ACLs. I was left feeling it had basically nothing to do with my job or relavent skills.

I have a couple of AWS certs. They really helped me when I went to the AWS conference and got some great swag

I got the _best_ multi-adapter charger at AWS Summit London thanks to my cert.

Yes! That was the best bit of swag in the whole place.

As a hiring manager, what is your course of action if someone doesn't have any of these? Do you reject a candidate due to a lack of certification?

Not at all, I would never reject someone for lack of any formal paper (degree, certificate), but if I have more resumes than time to phone screen them all, an AWS / Kubernetes certification is definitely a tie breaker for otherwise two similar candidates.

This doesn't answer the question by OP at all. You just listed two recent trendy certs.

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