I have lots of experience hiring people. Usually the people with certificates don't have much experience actually doing work or they have narrow capability. The cliche is putting them on your resume is not an indicator of general capability. 25 years ago there were tons of people with novell netware engineer and similar things for various technologies, but it wasn't a good interview signal. I was looking for software engineers though, and even though we were on windows at the time mostly, I didn't care about certified windows developers, people with that type of cert were not usually good devs in general. I even worked on helping to write the test for sql server, and I didn't see a point to getting certified myself and I authored part of it ;-)

I think it's really hard to get started in tech, and you can of course get benefit from actually studying the technologies and tools you'll be using in your job ;-) A certification is really good if you have a very specific use case and you need someone for a narrow type of work. I almost never want to hire someone for a narrow use case though. But if I was hiring contractors to fix something very specific on only aws say, then maybe it would be useful.

Of course I'm just some random person on the internet; getting a few certs might help at the start, listing things on your resume that you worked on is much better as an aid to getting interviewed and hired.

I've been involved with some hiring, but not a lot... and I would tend to agree that I wouldn't reject a resume just for listing certs on it. If I see a resume with experience and some cert listed at the end, I would not count it against the person. Now if their resume primarily focused on how many certs they have and not on experience, I would think they are entry level at best. If I am looking for entry-level, I may still give them a shot though.

lol I'm a principal engineer now and previously and EM with tons of hiring experience

This makes me curious. I have 3 AWS certs, that I was required to get because I work for Amazon. I put them on my LinkedIn (I'm proud of them, they were hard to get) but haven't considered putting them on my resume. Are they really that bad that I should consider removing them from LinkedIn too?

I mean I'm just one guy with an opinion. I see them sort of in the same vein as CompTIA, and I prefer to hire people that think on their feet and can solve problems quickly using whatever skills may be required for the task.

So generally I'm looking for creative problem solvers that do open source work and learn as they go on their own. I've just seen over my career that people who play the cert game are usually on the other end of this spectrum. I'm obviously painting in broad strokes here

How I build teams has worked really well for me, but there are lots of great ways of building teams that create value which are likely very different from mine.

I have experience hiring people.