Shoutout to my old boss who told me I was wasting my time on certifications

Had coffee with my ex-manager from 2019 last week and she said I should stop chasing certificates and just build stuff. She showed me her GitHub with 12 real projects that got her a senior role, and that hit me hard because I've spent like $800 on courses this year alone with nothing to show for it. Anyone else ditch the certs and just start building?

4 comments

4 Comments

grant15522d ago

My buddy spent $1200 on AWS certs last year and still couldn't land a job. He switched to building a simple app over two weekends, posted it on LinkedIn, and got three interview invites. Your ex-manager is right. Certificates prove you can pass a test, not that you can solve real problems. Employers want to see what you've actually made.

morganmartinez4d ago

Hear me out though, certs can open doors that a weekend app won't. I know a guy who spent six months grinding for his AWS Solutions Architect cert and it got him past the HR filter at a big bank. The app he built before that was cool but nobody at that company cared about it. The cert told them he could handle their compliance mess. @wren_mitchell's story works great for startups, but if you're trying to get into a place with strict hiring rules, a cert can be the only thing that makes you look serious. What kind of companies are you guys targeting where projects beat paper?

wren_mitchell22d ago

Traded studying for a weekend project myself. Built a dumb little weather app that pulled data from a free API and showed it on a map. Put it on GitHub with a readme that basically said "here's what I did and why it was harder than I expected." Got two recruiter DMs that week. One of them flat out told me they liked that I struggled through something real and wrote about it instead of listing certs.

kai_chen222d agoMost Upvoted

You ever notice how building something messy and real always beats a perfect test score? @wren_mitchell nailed it, people connect with the struggle and the story behind it. My advice, pick one small problem you actually have and make a janky fix for it, even if it's ugly.