Even degrees don't mean much. It's not like you get to skip the fizzbuzz and trivia/whiteboard gauntlet by virtue of a fancy CS degree from Yale. Obviously certifications are worth less than Ivy League degrees, so that should give some idea what certifications are worth.
The basic issue is that there are plenty of people with certifications and degrees that can't produce, they are completely helpless. And there are plenty of people with no certifications or degrees that are top notch producers. There's no correlation. You have to test each person, you can't rely on the paperwork from some third party to mean anything.
A related issue is it is not uncommon at all to find people creating certification sets and teaching university classes who have no experience doing design or development of real projects. Their experience is non-existent, also known as academic knowledge. It's not surprising that many students doing well grade-wise in these programs can not do real world work, other than perhaps pursue the PhD and join a university themselves to pass on their academic perspective, devoid of real world capability, to the next generation of academics.
On the other hand, a portfolio of their own work and past creations is a pretty good indicator of actual talent. People know what John Carmack, Larry Wall, and Linus Torvald's skills are, and it has nothing to do with any degrees they may or may not have.
I would guess that there is a very high correlation between CS degrees and programming or problem solving ability. I've worked in a pretty good lab full of grad students and their average skill level was dramatically higher than what you find at an average company (or at least, what I've seen working at half a dozen or so places), let alone what you see from average job applicants. Upon graduation most of these people easily found jobs at places like Google. They didn't get stumped on FizzBuzz because they had spent their time on abstract academic problems without real-world application.
There are definitely some people with CS degrees who cannot code, and you don't want to hire those people. The existence of these exceptions however doesn't mean that degrees aren't a strong positive signal when you are looking to hire somebody competent.
I think there's at least some reactionary bias against formal qualifications in the software industry and in startups. Some of the old professions like law or medicine do go too far the other way, but it's just as wrong to fetishize "real world experience".
In my experience, there are three kinds of people who get certified:
1) The highly competent who happened to be bored an afternoon and got one as a joke, or just to check how easy it was to get one, or as a result of a stupid bet. These people usually never mention their certifications on their resumes.
2) The competent people who were forced by their company to get certified for whatever reason. If you ask them they'll tell you, and it might be on their resumes, but as a footnote.
3) Finally, the incompetent people, who think the certifications are actually worth anything. They'll proudly highlight what they got, thinking other people will be impressed. When hiring, this is obviously a strong negative marker.
> 3) Finally, the incompetent people, who think the certifications are actually worth anything. They'll proudly highlight what they got, thinking other people will be impressed. When hiring, this is obviously a strong negative marker.
Don't forget jamming all of the their certs onto their business card like they have a PhD, MD, JD....except it reads some other string of acronym vomit made up of decidedly less impressive acronyms like: John Smith MCSE, CISSP, MCA, GSE, RHCE/RHCA, ITIL.
Typically, no. In my experience, anyone who hires you for the cert over experience, you don't actually want to work for. Using the cert as a conversation tool will usually get you shunned by people who work on whatever you're certified in day to day.
Yes, the certs are often hard to attain, but for the most part experience trumps them all and the only thing a cert proves is that you had time to read the books and take the tests.
The one exception I make is for Cisco/Juniper certs, if you have a cert you can jump ahead in the support queue. This could potentially save you hours/days in the dealing with support and is generally worth it in terms of time for you and your employer.
In my experience, anyone who hires you for the cert over experience
But isn't that usually a false dichotomy? That is, people don't hire just for certs, or just for experience. Certs and experience are both just part of the overall equation, with each (along with other factors) carrying different weights depending on who you're talking to.
Yes, the certs are often hard to attain, but for the most part experience trumps them all and the only thing a cert proves is that you had time to read the books and take the tests.
Couldn't you say the same thing for an undergraduate degree?
anyone who hires you for the cert over experience, you don't actually want to work for.
> "Couldn't you say the same thing for an undergraduate degree?"
Absolutely. That's also why presence of an undergrad degree is, for me, not at all a signal while hiring. The only exception is if the program is particularly well known for being rigorous and having high standards.
> "Why wouldn't you want to work for them?"
Because the vast majority of tech industry certifications is all fluff and marketing, with practically no correlation with competence. I distrust employers who can't even see through that extremely thin veneer of bullshit.
Reliance on unreliable markers like this is a hallmark of heavily bureaucratic organizations, where certifications are used as a cover-your-ass mechanism: "but he was MCSE certified! How was I to know he was a complete idiot?!"
I'm about to say negative things. I don't like saying negative things, particularly because someone could misread them as having personal animus behind them, which I don't have.
There's a particular type of college student who is not ready to work in a real job. They believe themselves incapable of working in real jobs, they signal this incapability, and employers generally hate working with them because they're needy and unprofessional. They don't thrive unless they have someone telling them "Do X then Y then Z" and then providing constant positive feedback ("100 points for X!"), which is a teacher-student relationship, not an employer-employee relationship.
Someone getting a certification is signaling a desire to continue being a student. Someone desiring to be an employee signals this desire by putting down the books and getting a job.
Whatever marginal value they have as a signal of commitment is swamped by their negative signaling. Top caliber talent won't usually be certified; why waste the time getting "certified" by organizations that are probably less competent than you?
Successive rounds of adverse selection produce a "certified" pool of candidates who are unwilling or unable to achieve a basic level of facility in their field on their own, which is its own negative signal.
I agree with that basically. I've spent the last 10 years kinda being a "fixer" but mostly a network engineer. I haven't had time for any certs, I'm too busy working... When I have time for certs, who knows what'll be going on.
Certs are a weird beast. If you are competent and working at a high level in your field, certs not only don't mean anything, they're a negative signal.
However, if you've banged around in dead-end entry level jobs till you're 40, didn't go to uni, and are desperate to break the $40k/yr barrier because you've racked up a history of ex-wives and expensive child support payments and spending yet another 5 years renting the room above your now elderly parent's garage...they can mean the difference between $20/hr and a proper full-time job with benefits and an actual real salary.
At those kinds of employment levels, and for those kinds of employers, we're not talking about staffers or employers who are passionate about their IT systems or development staff.
At those levels IT is a cost center, barely tolerated but necessary. Think "IT guy for a department store". Managed at corporate by somebody who made a name for themselves by being the top floor salesperson of ties and suspenders and who told his manager one day in passing that he can copy CDs to mp3 files and is therefore qualified to run the regional IT systems.
Both the employees and the employers in these situations simply have entirely different life priorities than most of the folks here. To these folks the certs are extremely valuable, perhaps a 20-30% pay bump on both sides.
To the corporate IT manager he gets to tell his bosses that he has certified staff (and not part-time hobbyists he wrangled up from the Geek Squad when the local Best Buy closed up shop). This metric, at those levels of abstraction is important.
To the employee it's a big pay bump, and opens up lots of mediocre, but better paying jobs.
If you think of the IT world as analogous to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the folks on this board are near the top, seeking Self-actualization, but the broader IT world is closer to the bottom of the pyramid and is therefore composed of many more people and positions in that pyramid.
Some folks are just simply destined to dwell in the lower levels of the pyramid, either by circumstance or poor life choices, and the cert might be just enough to move them up a level.
You can see from the answers in this thread that certifications, if worthy of anything at all, are deeply looked down upon by the same kind of people who read HN. And more often than not, these are the kind of people you want to be working with/for.
Generally, certifications, however, are appreciated by the stereotype of the HR department and non-technical managers of large organizations. If you have a certification from a brand name stating that you know how to use a particular technology, then no one is going to be blame for hiring you, even if it doesn't work out. That's the stereotype and unfortunately, it is far from uncommon.
You were spot on that people "can just clear this certification program just by preparing through previous question dumps. Does this do any good to anyone", but that's a broader problem relative to standardized test. To a large extent the same could be said about your degree.
Finally, as mentioned globally in the comments, experience is far more interesting than certifications. However, I may add that, for programmers, nothing, absolutely nothing, beats a code portfolio.
When asked by folks I occasionally give advice to, I try to push them towards creating something new and talking about it, writing an article, or contributing to an open source project. This is a much better way to join a professional community than attaching a certification to your name.
I've met (and worked with) folks who gain certification after certification. In the information security industry this is very rampant. Unfortunately, certification programs feel like empty knowledge. It's a lot of trivia, in some of the better ones there is hands-on, but I'd argue that once you have a foundation (from somewhere: school, work, cert program?) that you're better off improving yourself and demonstrating your worth by contributing to the community. Collecting more merit badges from cert providers doesn't really improve you as a professional beyond a certain level.
I consider the mid or high level Cisco certifications to be meaningful (I don't have one yet, and wouldn't require one, but most CCIEs I've met have been pretty good at networking.).
CISSP, CompTIA, A+ seem to be inversely correlated with competence, although government and some employers require them (hence, I have CISSP). The CISA is pretty much just for tech auditors (which is why I have one), and only seems correlated with "able to be corporate and write reports" vs tech skills.
The Glock Armorer's cert is superior in its domain to any short tech cert.
There are very few circumstances in which certifications are useful. Many companies will, however, pay for you to get certified as part of their employee benefit, so you should definitely take advantage of that. It will give you an opportunity to work on a new technology or develop a skill in an officially sanctioned way that can also be used during things like annual performance reviews.
Additionally, if you are any sort of consultant, having certification can help you acquire contracts.
Mainly, I've found certifications to be useful only when working with non-computer folks. Against your own peers they seem to have little to no weight. Fortunately, they don't really have any negative weight either, unless you go around flaunting them.
There's a certification that always seems to be overlooked in these discussions but seems to be much agreed upon and present in other discussions, though for some reason its rarely mentioned in this topic.
When hiring my company's policy is that a code sample is a perfectly acceptable certification, often far more acceptable and telling than some of the more expensive forms.
And I think that we should all think of code samples as such. Especially if the code is public, or accepted into a (large/open source) project. A code sample is a certification, and one that is literally put to use in a production system/application has got to be one of the most valuable kinds of certification - that is, social proof - that one can achieve.
Certifications are proof that you passed a test. This either means that you memorized a battery of questions, or you actually know the material.
Going with the latter (as the former would be weeded out nearly immediately on the job), it means that you know at least something about a topic, and are able to be trained on it.
Certs are more useful/common in the ops word. Personally I do the training/certification when I want to learn how to run a new operating system or application. It's a motivational time limit, and should teach you the basics at a minimum.
The other reason they're popular is they're a way to jump up the ladder at various workplaces that don't allow other methods of internal advancement, which is pretty dumb.
Certification is a form of social proof, and a shortcut to find people who might be qualified in some industries.
They are worth it if your 'customer' (employer, actual customer, other) cares. But, thinking about acquiring social proof rather than certifications leads to a more interesting set of ideas.
For eg., you can acquire Salesforce certification for their platform or you can build a Salesforce app that customers use and rate highly. In turn, you would use the app to generate revenue or give it away for free so you can get multi million consulting contracts(slight exaggeration).
If you are looking to be cool with the tech crowd, no they are never worth it. If you want to provide a service to customers, social proof matters.
Certs help you get the interview, they don't mean you can do the job and that's the real crux of them.
Most (not all) are pointless multiple guess waste of time and passable by anybody compitent after they have drunk a bottle of vodka, been up for 5 days straight etc etc.
Some are actualy using real good practical exams and those have some crdability though they are few and washed by the tarnshish of certs being crap since the MCSE multiple guess muppet days. I've been a situation were the MCSE guru was unable to resolve a windows problem and me as the UNIX guru solved in a minute using common sence and understanding computers. That to me highlighted why alot of certs are bad.
Now sadly certs help you get past the HR people who have no clue about IT and over the past 10-20 years grown into a egotistical power-house that controls things they have no clue upon. 20 years ago I had a job interview, I was in my late teens and was a etchnical position. HR interviewed me first and there attitude was so sucking even saying I dont see why somebody your age should be paid this amount. i then had te technical interview with the person who was the manager for the job and his contractor and blew them both away with my skills that they offered me more than I was asking for. I turned them down just becasue the HR department pissed me off that much. So Brown and Root engineering, you missed out there.
Sadly HR have grown and so have a whole generation of IT managers who don't know IT or can use word and think that is knowing IT. These sadly have no clue and will look at a CV for certs.
Bottom line if they need certs then generaly they are not a company that you want to work for and if they dont demand certs and do proper technical interviews/screening, then they are the ones you want to be working for. Anything else is extra crap/stress you will never be paid to endure.
Remember that there is only one real certification that carry's any real weight and needs to be respected and that is the certification of sane and insane. Respect them both as one bites and the other knows somebody who bites.
How to get a interview and bypass HR, now that is a certification I'd study for thesedays.
I am in a technical field (ops) full of them and I have none. I don't see much worth in certs. Ability should be pretty obvious by performance in entry level positions.
The basic issue is that there are plenty of people with certifications and degrees that can't produce, they are completely helpless. And there are plenty of people with no certifications or degrees that are top notch producers. There's no correlation. You have to test each person, you can't rely on the paperwork from some third party to mean anything.
A related issue is it is not uncommon at all to find people creating certification sets and teaching university classes who have no experience doing design or development of real projects. Their experience is non-existent, also known as academic knowledge. It's not surprising that many students doing well grade-wise in these programs can not do real world work, other than perhaps pursue the PhD and join a university themselves to pass on their academic perspective, devoid of real world capability, to the next generation of academics.
On the other hand, a portfolio of their own work and past creations is a pretty good indicator of actual talent. People know what John Carmack, Larry Wall, and Linus Torvald's skills are, and it has nothing to do with any degrees they may or may not have.