Thing the First: > Instead of actually providing a real technical support team.
Apparently you've never used their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. Not only technical knowledge but dealing with customers, providing help above and beyond the actual question in front of their face, etc. The only other technical support team that has impressed me this much is Kraken's.
Yes, I have to pay for that support. I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile ("What's wrong with my flugelmesserbeano?"), for my medical conditions ("Is it safe to take these two medications together?"), for my house exterior ("If I don't fix that drainage problem what could happen in five years?"), for my house interior ("How should I Remodel the kitchen to fit my lifestyle?"), etc.
> Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars
and quoting CactusOnFire > I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam.
I too used to look down on certification.
I made a damn good living "doing computers" (still do): networking, development, what's now called BI reporting, backup and restores, etc. This for multiple startups, SMBs and $BIGCORPs.
I then wanted to get into training: MCSE, SCSA, LPI, etc. For that, I had to be certified. No problem, I thought, certifications are for fools and children; this will be a cake walk.
Great Ghu! There was _so_ _much_ I didn't know or even know about. Certifications filled in _so_ many gaps and minutiae. (You don't know what you don't know.) Not only did it fill in the gaps, allowing me to better utilize the knowledge I already had it let me make more sense of those shapes I see off in the tech horizon.
Now because I have these certs, should you then treat me as if I was the next coming of Ritchie? :-|
Certs show that you have a _base_ knowledge, not that your the reincarnation of Turing.
Are there people who abuse the system? Sure! Name a system involving humans that isn't/hasn't been abused, corrupted, and twisted beyond what it was meant to do. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I've come to the conclusion that people who sht on people (mostly utes [sic]) for getting technical certifications are the same ones who sht on recent high school graduates: Oh, you have a high school diploma? How nice. /s It says here you took English and math classes. Let's see how good you are. Write a 5,000 word dissertation on the impact of Don Quixote on Western literature, then prove Fermat's Last Theorem. If you can't do that in 30 minutes, GTFO you poser.'
What's that? You don't treat ppl with high school diplomas or bachelor/masters' degrees like that? Then why treat people going after certs like that?
(Also, if you’re going to say “shit”, please just write it out. If not, use a different word)
My experience is very much the opposite of what you wrote, both with free support and paid Amazon Managed Services. Their support can often be as helpful and truthful as their piece of crap parody of a services health dashboard[1].
> I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile
When your vehicle is under warranty, you've already paid for checks and repairs upfront. Just like you pay for amzn's services. You can buy additional support for your car and cloud stuff, and better private healthcare, but you don't _have_to_ if you've paid for warranty or insurance. Depends of course on use case and what you need: help building stuff or help figuring out why isn't stuff working as you'd like it to. When you want Amazon to simply fix their shit, paying for support smells like an extortion and pushing you to forums will give them more time to not provide fixes.
Therefore I think that the commenter you are responding to is right: Amazon seems to be attempting to acquire free workforce and pushing their customers to "community support" or whatever shitty phrasing they'll use to set up a barrier between a customer and their actual employees. And they do have a long history of exploiting and even destroying their customers (diapers dot com etc).
I believe that the problem Amazon has right now is that they created certification-based business model which was one of factors raising salaries in the sector but they would still like to pay shit and overwork their staff paid in peanuts.
And while I know what salaries can an engineer expect for working for AWS in the US, I don't remember when was the last time I dealt with non-Indian reps.
[1] status.aws.amazon.com
Is it possible you normally deal with support within the same 8 hour window? I believe they have a global rota, I often end up talking to reps in Ireland.
I know it's a scam. HR teams don't. If ponying up $400 every 3 years gets me a more senior position with slightly better compensation, it's worth the ROI.
Likewise if a candidate has a lot of certifications there’s usually a question “does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests “
Which is interesting, given that the places that should be able to tell if a person really knows their stuff tend to lean hard on "leetcode" type interviews. Which is basically "is this candidate good at memorization and taking tests?"
Being able to do it on a whiteboard with people around you, and answering questions right when they are asked is a skill, I admit. It's a poor analog for what the work usually ends up being, though.
No matter how much grit you have, if it takes you 10 hours to do what everyone else is doing in 1 hour, you will struggle _a lot_ at your job.
I can't always bang it out on a whiteboard from memory though. If I could, I don't think that would somehow make me a better developer. It might make be a better T/A in an academic environment, but that's not typically what these kind of interviews are hiring for.
In a lot of organizations, the people responsible for identifying if a candidate is "good" and the people who are responsible for calibrating their offer, and where they enter a ladder in terms of seniority, are entirely different groups. Certifications are justifiable insofar as they're aimed entirely at the latter.
all AWS certs are paid for by my employer through exam vouchers -- who in turn gets free/discounted exam vouchers from AWS through their partnership either directly or indirectly discounted through partner credits worth hundreds and thousands of dollars of AWS usage that we as an org definitely use up to offset our consumption bills.
I personally never paid a single dollar for AWS cert exam.
I did pay for a few AWS exam prep courses and study resources -- and some of them were reimbursed by my employer.
You don't have to renew all your expired certs if you don't see the need and you have moved on to bigger/different things in your career.
In my experience studying for a cert exam fills in gaps and brings you up to date on best practices and newer features.
I don't believe anyone's job is so broad and deep at the same time that their hands-on experience makes the certification completely redundant.
EDIT:
Here is a person sharing their experience -- he/she may be overdoing it with the number of certs but they are looking at certs as a means to learn more beyond their current job role and look for career growth
https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/comments/ks28yi/7...
If nothing, the knowledge from the certs give you the necessary footing to approach your next project/job with the right mindset in areas your previous experience may not have exposed you to.
"I used to have AWS certification. Amazon even prolonged it from 2 to 3 years but I had no reasons to renew it afterwards. I still work on this stuff and my practical knowledge isn't outdated. I won't remember what pricing tricks every single service has but I'm able to quickly set up or fix things"
Sure, there are businesses that require you to have a shiny, fresh certifications. There are also companies that value their employees' and contractors' ability to choose what is worth doing and what seems to be a waste of time and energy.
the circle has been reinvented - again!
Lets call it the circle reinvention club or does this already exist?
Meta comment — It’s disappointing the top voted comment does nothing but spread negativity. I see attitude like this that automatically assumes the worst in anything ever happening and tries to poison the well for others. I’m grateful and incredibly lucky that my co workers aren’t like this.
I'm also a fan of the AWS certifications from the employee side. Not everybody is pulling X00K at a FAANG. If you want a cloud job at regular enterprise, it's a good way to get your foot in the door.
And they state it will be driven by customers, partners and employees of AWS, so at least on paper they aren't fully relying on customers.
I've seen what some developers without certifications put together on AWS and it's a mess.
But this re:Post thing I don't believe in personally. I'm so tired of these giant tech companies building walled gardens and censoring and controlling anyone inside.
For me putting my SO profile in my resume really was a boon that allowed me to skip a lot of the technical interview (not all of it, of course).
You sound like someone who has exactly zero dealings with AWS support. They set the bar in this industry. The first thing I do when I join a new employer is reach out to our Account Manager or Technical Account Manager at AWS to set up bi-weekly cadence meetings and ask for specific criticism from their Solutions Architects on whatever I'm thinking of implementing. They will ask my team for feedback on next features they're thinking to implement.
They have been the finest design partners I have ever encountered. I consider my last AM a friend.
Your comment is of such poor quality, it should be flagged for misinformation, and I almost never flag here on HN, even on politically divisive subjects.
I think it’s possible to damage your reputation beyond repair, making even ridiculous claims sound plausible.
By contrast in a previous job I dealt with Azure support on the regular, an experience which was akin to pulling teeth.
I’ve yet to actually get through to a support person at GCP whenever I’ve tried.
It only takes a day to burn the bridge you spent a year building.
Like literally everyone else?
Instead of actually providing a real technical support team.
Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars, so I expect it might actually work.