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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I think this is exactly right. If you look at what's going on at education in general right now, "credentialing" is one of the top challenges for education startups. Particularly for MOOCs but also for bootcamps. How are hiring managers supposed to know which certificates mean something or which classes actually teach people something? LinkedIn's revenue right now is all about services to make recruiting easier.

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Some certs mean nothing, but some of the MOOCs do apparently earn you some credence.

I know the NSA, for instance, regards completing Coursera's Data Science specialization [0] as at least noteworthy enough to mention it in their Data Science job listings.

[0] https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1

Strikes me as an R data wrangler certification, not a hard core data science quant / codebreaker, not that there's anything wrong with that.

My personal opinion is that credentialing is going out of style anyway. Employers want to see what you can do, not where you learned.

Put another way -- when's the last time you cared if someone was Microsoft Visual C++ .NET certified?

For startups, I agree: certificates mean nothing. In fact, they can be a detriment as the certificates cause an increase in pay that may not be affordable in a startups budget. Plus since startups tend to live on the bleeding edge, there tend to not be certificates for newer technologies like golang. For large enterprises, I believe it gives them the peace of mind that the new hire has at least basic skills in a technology.

For tech roles this effect is compounded by the fact that, in a startup, the person doing the hiring is likely to be technical themselves so they can quickly work out whether someone has basic skills, whereas in a bigger company HR likely can't do so as easily.

Back in 2001 I asked my manager about taking Microsoft certified classes to earn a Microsoft developer certificate. He told me it was a waste of time as all of the tests for it are on file sharing networks and Microsoft doesn't change their tests often enough so people study the pirated tests and then pay for the exams and get certified without knowing the material.

At least that was his reason for not supporting me and getting money for me to take classes on it.

I was already a very good Visual BASIC programmer. I earned a reputation for debugging other people's code and fixing databases in SQL Server.

They would have comp sci bachelor of science holders, who could not even program. I had to train them in Visual BASIC to get them started. I only had an Associates because I could not afford a Bachelors.

I take MOOC classes for free, so I don't get certified, but at least I learn new skills.

I agree that some certifications are out of style, specifically in programming because you can glean so much more data about a candidate from their code rather than a certification.

However, in other areas, if the certification is sufficiently difficult to attain such as Cisco's networking certificates, or where you can't assign a task or review past work to determine an individual's skill level I think certifications can be helpful even in a startup hiring environment.

For example, if you are applying as a product management and have relatively junior experience but you have a great feel for our product and market I would still be potentially worried about how well you can interface with a team. So seeing a certification around SCRUM or Agile, in this particular case will certainly be helpful.

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