I finally stopped chasing certifications after a 3 hour interview went nowhere

Last month I spent 3 hours doing a coding test for a senior dev role at a startup in Austin. I had 6 certs on my resume and thought that was the ticket. The interviewer barely glanced at them and instead grilled me on a side project I built 2 years ago. I realized I wasted like $2,000 on certs that nobody actually cares about. Now I focus on building stuff and sharing it on GitHub instead. Has anyone else seen certs get totally ignored in a hiring process?

3 comments

3 Comments

xenaf5120d ago

Actually certifications can still open doors in more traditional companies, @wesley181, just depends on the field.

faithcampbell20d ago

Had a buddy I worked with a few years back spend a whole weekend studying for some AWS cert. Showed up to an interview and the lead dev literally said "cool, but can you tell me about a time you debugged a production issue?" The cert never came up. @wesley181 hit the nail on the head, those things are just for getting past the resume bots, not for actual conversation. My friend walked out of that room feeling like he could have just built a tiny app and talked through it instead. Now he only does certs if his employer pays for them and he knows the job already requires it.

wesley18120d ago

Certs get you past HR filters, not through technical interviews. Skip the paper and spend that time on projects you can actually talk through.