sam530•3d ago

Used to chase certifications like crazy, then a senior dev set me straight

I spent two years getting AWS certs thinking they'd land me a cloud job, but after 6 months of getting ignored I talked to a guy at a meetup in Austin who said nobody cares about certs without real project experience. He showed me his GitHub with one solid open source contribution that got him hired. Anyone else ditch the cert grind for building actual stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyatt_green3d ago

Oh man, this hits close to home. I had a buddy who dropped like two grand on every Salesforce cert he could find, even took a week off work to study for one. He was convinced it was his golden ticket. Then his neighbor who's a lead dev at some startup told him flat out that his own hiring team throws cert-heavy resumes in the trash if there's no code to back it up. My friend switched gears, spent three months building a simple inventory tracker for his local bike shop, and that single project got him a junior dev role. He still gripes about all that wasted cert money every time we grab a beer.

derek9393d ago

dude that's rough, i feel for your buddy. it's such a bummer to put all that time and money into something only to find out the market doesn't even care about it. at least he landed on his feet though, sounds like he made a smart pivot in the end.