Certifications create wrong incentives for engineers and recruiters

Author/OP here. Just heard an interesting and relevant tidbit from someone who read the post. Apparently a while ago, Google fed resumes of employees into an ML model and correlated several metrics to the success of a specific engineer at Google. There was a lot of interesting data gathered from that but one that stood out was exactly that the number of certifications listed was inversely proportional to the engineer's success (measured as career progress).

&gt; People often suggest that interviewing.io should create a certification that our users can post on their LinkedIn profile, e.g., something like “Top 10% performer on interviewing.io”<p>Rest of the discussion aside, “we will give you a certificate of being good at interviews” is one of the most absurd grifts I’ve heard in awhile…

When you plot graphs that present a 4% point difference as a visual 100% or 200% difference because your axis starts at 50 and ends at 58, I automatically don’t read what you have to say.

Where I work (we sell software) there&#x27;s nobody in engineering with certifications. IT has all the certifications.<p>I&#x27;ve been working since the mid-1990s and this has almost always held true. No one building the stuff has a certification in it. The people who buy it and install it tend to have the certifications.<p>Over the years I&#x27;ve seen a fair # of hilarious exchanges where someone with a Certification in X tries to tell someone else they&#x27;re wrong and then gets embarrassed when they are told the person they&#x27;re arguing with is the inventor or holds the patent on X.<p>So many of these certifications also seem to train someone to buy products from a company. Our IT guys are always super sure we need products they got certified in, to the point it seems fishy.<p>My gut feeling is this article is right on the money. The smartest people with formal education are more than capable of teaching themselves this stuff. If you&#x27;ve got a quality degree you shouldn&#x27;t need a certificate in X to implement X in your product. The certificate won&#x27;t cover that anyway since no one has ever integrated it into the new product you&#x27;re building anyway.

I took a C# certification on linked in yesterday. It took 10 minutes and was incredibly simple. And the questions were straight to the point C# language questions, pretty easy if you actually work with the language day to day. I liked that it didn&#x27;t have any questions you&#x27;d only know if you happen to be working with the esoteric JSON library du jour, it was pure C# language spec stuff.<p>I&#x27;ll let you know when I&#x27;m standing in line at the soup kitchen, but so far finding work hasn&#x27;t been a problem.

Berkson&#x27;s paradox[1] is a useful lens to analyze inverse correlation. The pool of people doing interview prep are either smart or determined (to accumulate certifications) or both, but dumb and lazy people don&#x27;t enter the pool, and an inverse correlation applies. Similarly, if an interview bar evaluates candidates though a combination of soft and hard skills and rejects those who lack both, even if soft and hard skills are independently distributed (or positively correlated with insufficient strength), soft and hard skills will appear to be inversely correlated.<p>Certs could be neutrally or even positively correlated with interview performance, but by pre-filtering the population, the opposite phenomenon arises.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Berkson%27s_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Berkson%27s_paradox</a>

What&#x27;s important to understand is that certifications can be used in different ways by different industries.<p>Some use them as a <i>minimum requirement</i> for performing certain jobs. In such a case, listing certifications is valuable not because it says you are any good at your job, but because it shows simply that you meet the minimum requirements to be legally employed in your profession.<p>The other way they are used is as a <i>marker of expertise</i>. This is almost always misguided. Advertising one&#x27;s certification status where none is required conveys a sense of insecurity, need for social approval, and overly strong attachment to formal procedures.<p>That does not mean you cannot learn something from a certification course - by all means! But true experts are always judged by their <i>results</i>, not by their certs.

I started my career not as a software developer but as a &quot;devops&quot; engineer and don&#x27;t have a degree.<p>I found that studying for certs was incredibly helpful for me in the start. I learned how to be a Linux power user with the LPIC-1 and 2, I learned networking with the CCNA, did certifications for configuration management tools for stuff like Puppet, got my CKA, and my AWS SA.<p>On top of being a self taught programmer (I don&#x27;t do anything impressive, my code is just throwing JSON from one side of a datacenter to the other) I feel that I am pretty good at my job. I&#x27;m comfortable working on a private cloud which has services scaled to millions of concurrent users.<p>I&#x27;ll never get a FAANG job, but I still make good money and regularly get positive performance reviews and peer feedback at the jobs I do have.<p>So if you feel like getting a cert will plug a knowledge gap, please go ahead and get that cert. But don&#x27;t get certs just to collect trophies to put on LinkedIn.<p>Also, if anyone can recommend a good alternative to the now defunct Linux Academy, I would totally purchase a subscription. A Cloud Guru ran that amazing resource into the ground and now just caters to cert chasers collecting trophies instead of actually going above and beyond to teach the fundamentals of a technology.

When charts don’t start at 0 I have a sense the author is trying to manipulate the results to fit their narrative.<p>53 vs 57 is presented as if the difference was over 50% and including shitty Linkedin, Udemy etc. certifications makes me think this article started from the conclusion and tried to find the data to match.

I&#x27;ve worked in finance, healthcare and defense industry, all those industries do not mark you negative for having IT related certifications. Continue education is a big thing in those industries and generally, degrees and certifications usually get reimbursed.<p>For me, the key is to match certifications with their work. If I see OCAJP, but zero work experience in that space, or you work on-prem system only, but has AWS Professional, then it&#x27;s obviously useless.

&gt; <i>Top 10% performer on interviewing.io</i><p>That is not a legitimate certification of any kind. If you stick that into a resume, that&#x27;s a good way to get to the reject pile.<p>All that is communicating is that the candidate spends a lot of time on some website for people obsessed with interviewing, which is a huge red flag.<p>A certification is like &quot;completed XYZ training offered by ABC, in 2020&quot;, if it&#x27;s something that has industry recognition.

The author doesn&#x27;t elaborate a good case on why they would do harm (for readers that didn&#x27;t go to top universities or have top-only institutional certifications).<p>For opportunities and recruiters excluding who can&#x27;t signal top institutions, doesn&#x27;t matter if you made it to the first screen call because you didn&#x27;t have them anyway. Forget about them. There is a sea of other opportunities. So no harm.

The bar charts in this article are bad. I guess because if they had normal axis you&#x27;d realize the differences are insignificant. Also if I&#x27;m reading this correctly, the more certs I list - the less I&#x27;ll hear from recruiters? If so, excellent. I&#x27;ll do that in addition to adding a weird unicode character to my name.

you can pry my Andrew Ng Coursera ML cert from my cold dead hands

I don&#x27;t buy the approach. What does it even mean &#x27;Cisco&#x27;? CCENT? CCNA? DEVNET? CCIE? Cursera - it varies greatly in quality. Amazon again, Solutions Architect is a memorization exercise, on other side SysOps is more hands on. Yet graphs lumps all those together.

&gt; The engineer who looks good on paper. This person will simply not list the certification on their profile – they have no reason to!<p>I don&#x27;t think I buy this logic. I finished an online course with a good test score, and it prompted me to post the resulting certification on LinkedIn. It took 15 seconds at the moment I was happiest about the accomplishment. If we assume I&#x27;m an engineer who looks good on paper, am I going to deliberately eschew that prompt?<p>Is the argument that as an engineer who looks good on paper, I&#x27;m in such heavy demand that I never have a few minutes to kill on LinkedIn, in between declining and ignoring the recruiter come-ons? That logic just doesn&#x27;t make sense to me.

You might have a case, but your histograms are so annoyingly misleading that it&#x27;s a big red flag for me in general re: your whole site. Would not do business with someone who chooses to make their case that way if I had any choice.

I went to a cyber security college program, and the new program head was turning it into a bunch of micro credentials packaged together with a diploma.<p>I told him I could self study and get all the credentials on my own faster and cheaper, and that removing labs from the program and changing Cisco certs for CompTIA was not a good idea from a students perspective, and I quit the program.<p>Dumbing things down to increase graduations rates seemed to have been the goal, and as a mature student that wanted to learn and not just get my foot in the door as a T1 Help Desk role. And we wonder why it&#x27;s hard to find qualified employees in tech.

As a consultant, I can always tell which engineering consultants are going to be worthless.<p>The engineers with tons of certs absolutely suck.<p>Recently worked with one who had like 4 professional grade AWS certs and they couldn’t do anything in AWS

Certifications are great if they are meaningful. Most aren’t.<p>A meaningful certification requires a skills based, hands-on assessment of if a person can do the the thing the certification says they can. It should be proctored and require effort to obtain. A meaningful certification is not an evaluation of knowledge but rather an assessment of skill.<p>RedHat has great certs that are respected in the industry because it tests if you can do the things it asks. You would hire someone based on this.<p>Many companies let you take a multiple choice test to “certify” you. Those are worthless and are generally just part of the marketing funnel.

So the theory according to them is that if you don’t have a good company or school on your cv then you don’t have pedigree, so though luck, don’t pretend you’re good because you study and pass exams. This from the lady who was calling developers ‘peons’. If you put a certification ‘top 1% of interviewing.io’ then yes, it’s worthless. But if you have a industry known and reputable certification, then you stand out a bit, depending how fresh it is. You still need to pass the interview.

Wondering if HN can give me a hand. Been trying to segue from dev to devops (or platform eng) and certs seem like a good way to indicate interest and some level of competency in lieu of job experience. Had devops interviews before any nobody wants to take a chance on me or feel like it&#x27;ll cause problems since I am mid career as a dev. What are my avenues if not certs to get my foot in the door? Targeting AWS. Have a dev blog and github with projects.

The premise doesn&#x27;t follow conclusions here. There is a big difference between a certification that says that &quot;I know JavaScript&quot; versus &quot;I am in the top 10% of JavaScript developers (by whatever metric).<p>Coursera&#x2F;Udemy&#x2F;etc certs are obviously useless because they don&#x27;t actually signal anything.<p>A &quot;Top 10% at interviewing&quot; cert is a bizarre idea but the two don&#x27;t compare imo.

The one thing where I disagree is Cisco certification. CCIE, at least back in the day, was the gold standard for network engineer. It was pretty much required if you wanted anything to do with networking. I’m not sure now if that’s relevant but I think it can’t hurt.<p>Programming certifications definitely look terrible. I would rather interview someone with a side project than someone with a cert.

&quot;The one standout is Triplebyte. Their graduates are 6 percentage points more likely to pass interviews —a serious boost, albeit not enough to dispel the negative signal that all the others carry.&quot;<p>I believe that interviewing.io and Triplebyte are associated entities. So grain of salt.

One thing I&#x27;ve been thinking about is getting a GCP certification to increase GCP recruiter reachout down the road, as I&#x27;ve really enjoyed working with GCP and would like to stick with it in future work. Guess I&#x27;ll just do more keyword work in the LinkedIn. :)

I tailor my CV to <i>the job I want</i>. The golden rule of two A4 pages with the <i>relevant</i> badges and certs which apply to the job you want, not a laundry list of every little badge you earned throughout your career. There is sometimes merit in simplicity.

From the article:<p>&gt; today’s depressed labor market<p>I thought the US unemployment rate for tech jobs was below 2% (unemployment in general in the US is below 4%).

&gt; If your profile doesn’t have a reputable school or a top company on it<p>Which is like 99% of the entire job pool? What&#x27;s a &#x27;reputable school&#x27;? Ivy league? My university was abroad. It&#x27;s reputable there. It&#x27;s unknown in the US. Do we even care about schools in IT after a couple of years in the job market?<p>Likewise, what&#x27;s a &quot;top company&quot;? FAANG? Fortune 500?<p>But yes, &#x27;interviewing.io&#x27; certification would be BS indeed. All it would signal is that the person is good at interviews. It would be even worse than leetcode.

Interesting take. Post title should be more precise, the article focuses on engineers’ roles.

That graph seems like something straight out of the Lying With Statistics book.

I laugh at certifications, people that accumulate certifications, am skeptical of adjacent industries that actually seem to respect certifications (IT, Cybersecurity) and still sort of laugh at them because actual programmers and hackers defeat the &quot;best practices&quot; all the time while having no certifications. I&#x27;m also skeptical of bootcamps the same way.<p>I don&#x27;t have a solution to gatekeeping, I&#x27;m not saying &quot;you need a university degree&quot;, because you don&#x27;t.<p>My feelings do match the model shown in the article.