Ask HN: Software Engineer Certifications That Mean Something? I know my manager is going to push a cert as part of my goals again this year. Last year I did AWS Certified Solutions Architect and got a lot out of what I learned. Criteria for "mean something" are: 1. Learning helpful things 2. Meaningful on a resume |
A number of years ago I did do a certification on project management from Coursera, which is a good look. Your software related experience should speak for itself, but tangential certifications like project management look like an 'above and beyond' type of thing, IMO.
When I see an actual software certification, my thinking is that this is a person who likes checking skill boxes, but who will miss the big picture when it comes time to actually solve problems.
I've done a few when my employer paid for them, and they have all had no real world value to me. I have had value from doing degrees, and online courses (e.g. Coursera) that come from good universities. They don't have the brand recognition that certs have, but the education is generally better and has more lasting value.
I can see they might be useful for someone junior trying to get past HR filters. I did know one very senior guy who was obsessed with getting every single certification known to humanity, but he was an outlier in more ways than one ;)
1. This credential actually gives you a huge amount of privilege to use restricted radio spectra.
2. It teaches you a lot about how software, hardware, and wireless come together.
3. It's great for emergencies.
4. Opens up a lot of homebrew and DIY skill-sets for projects relating to IoT and smart devices.
I put it on my resume, though, not everyone agrees with this practice.
I will say, it's really fun to find other Hams in the industry, it makes it really easy to chit chat about a shared technical hobby.
why not create a certificate that is prestige, even for experienced developers? Maybe it would deprecate the ridiculous leetcode interview process.
The software engineer industry needs the equivalent of CFA (in finance). That means something.
https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/
https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
Another respectable cert track is CCNA/CCIE. That is, of course, entirely networking, but it's really interesting, and the context it provides is very useful for day to day dev work.
Those are the only two I'd put any positive signal in on a resume. The rest would be either neutral or negative (if you have a dozen different certs listed on your resume, it triggers apprehension in me).
IEEE Professional Software Engineering Master
I haven't taken the exam, but started an online course, and it's been interesting.
Very textbook stuff, but towards a more succinct reference than lots of books about how software gets built. Not that formalism isn't important, I just haven't had a season of interest in it, particularly since it's so sparse and mostly without principles.
Otherwise I like the RedHat OpenShift Developer certs if you deal with their ecosystem. (i.e. EX288)
At the end of the day though, certification will never really mean the same in SWE as it means in the vendor lock-in world of cloud - and this is a very good thing.
In the industry I now work in a security certification is also required. The minimum is Security+ but having CASP or CISSP is helpful.
Jobs that require certs are amazing. They are amazing just for the fact that they filter out a bunch of people who should never be there. That is a night and day difference compared to JavaScript jobs where it seems almost nobody can program and very few of those people should be writing software.
Most other Coursera (and edX) courses are quite easy to pass. Either you have multiple choice tests and several attempts to figure out the right answers, or you have peer-reviewed tasks and I always thought that the whole peer review process is quite bizarre.
I generally find a lot of certifications are pretty useless -- hard to tell if people learned anything, retained anything, or can apply anything.
A few folks here mentioned GitHub and open source projects. If you build something small/cool and demo it via an open source repo, then you prove that you can learn, code, build, and ship. Way better/cooler than a certificate IMHO.