* * *

Those are all reasonable hypotheses... but I also suspect natural curiosity has little correlation with certifications. Those programs tend to be big "learn to the test" curricula of trivia and question banks.

I think that’s largely because people who get certificates often do so because they didn’t have formal (or close to formal, e.g. highly motivated dropouts) education in the field they are getting a certificate.

(also - job churn, and/or they may be slightly less autodidactic)

I'm a "highly-motivated dropout" and I accumulated a few certs in a previous life because my employer paid for it and it was for areas in which I already had knowledge (mid-level CompTIA stuff, Agile, AWS). I'd typically buy the book, read through it in week or two and highlight it, take notes, then do the test. I never once failed via this method. As it turns out, however, this is a very niche approach. The vast majority of my peers looking to get such certs would go to a "bootcamp" and spend months memorizing test banks compiled by third parties.

There's a gulf of difference between somebody that gets a cert to validate their knowledge and somebody that does so to get a piece of paper. The amount of people that fall into the latter category seems to dwarf those in the former as an industry has been built around prepping under-experienced people for these certifications in the hopes of advancing their career.

This is all to say that the sentiment expressed in this article is unfortunately largely correct. I've since let all of mine lapse because the employers I now work for value demonstrable technical acumen over something that somebody likely bulldozed their way through four years ago and requires $200 annually to renew.

Exactly! You get certifications to prove you can do a job (in theory); the most successful people never have to prove they can do a job.

Go look at all of Carmack's certifications, or Torvalds, etc.

except, bullying people over perceived "lack of" whatever is first stop for abusive job shops. The problems of "the most successful people" are not the problems of a million+ twenty-somethings trying to work for a living. Please recall that in some nations right now, the majority of the population is under 25. Literate people are being setup to be cheap IT labor right now, fair or not.

from my experiencing interviewing, people get and list certificates not for that reason but because they have less awareness that those certificate are considered BS and therefore listing them indicates how you don't recognize BS.

Ymmv: I work in enterprise environment and certifications are often an entry criterion. There's a world outside HN.

i know a major health insurer incentivizes and almost forces IT staff to get at least the entry AWS cert. but now they'll prob tell them to list it on their linkedins so they don't get hired away.

Not even close to being true. I’m forced at times to get certifications for enterprise-y tools and software.

Many networking engineers need a Cisco cert to get started. Same with a lot of security analysts.

If you’re working in Defense you’ll need to get a cert(s) at some point.

Way back being Microsoft certified was all the rage. I was catering at the time near a Microsoft training office and they were a very good customer. The rooms didn’t have a single seat and people were flying in to take them. This was 15 years ago.

Thanks for the context around the subject - piles of data don't mean anything until run through some kind of system and with a goal IMHO. That's an interesting wrinkle in the evaluation / desensitization of employees as humans. Metrics!

What's so hilarious to me in the big picture is how Google and AI in general realize they only make interesting news when they use finished products or concepts because their systems are evolutionally stupid and still can't make a decent song like a child at a piano.

I think you made a critical error of being too generic? What field and what certs? If 90% of certs are junk the your takeaway is wrong because people are posting the wrong certs? What about industry? I didn't even know coders had certs but in infosec for example some certs hold a lot of weight.

I've been on the other side of an interview a few times and I can tell you, I will ask more specific and technical questions if you list a technical cert. I have a few certs but mostly to show my range of skills.

See, interviewers look at one thing I did on a past job or a few things I did because they need to be done and their takeaway is "this guy is more into such and such tech but we need someone who knows something else" but I list the certs to allow them to grill me and find out I actually know that shit.

Now, I have seen lazy-ass managers even on HN that blindly associate having certs with not having skills and to be honestI want nothing to do with such people or orgs that tolerate blatantly lazy managers who can't even delegate technical interviews to their subordinates but instead use gut feelings like this to make decisions. A person spends thousands of dollars on certs and their impression is that person is lame but someone half-starts a bunch of things and is a smooth talker and that's their man.

So, yeah, I guess it helps filter out bad employers just like it helps filter out bad employees. If you refuse to interview someone because they actually have a cert, yeah, that shit needs to be illegal.

Read TFA, they do comparisons based on the certifying agency.

I did TFA:

This is what you mean right?:

Coursera LinkedIn Triplebyte Microsoft Amazon Web Services (AWS) Oracle Udacity Udemy HackerRank Cisco

Are you trying to say you can tell what industry the cert is for based on that alone? Microsoft? Cisco? Haha, Udemy????

I think you can infer industry from some of those, but mea culpa; you were focused on a different angle and it was my reading comprehension that was flawed.

Link?

Career progress means that Principal Engineers don't have certs -- does that add any value to determine whether certs have value? I'd say Principal Engineers are typically the ones designing the courses and have no use for displaying their qualifications.

Google and google-level companies are a world of their own and I would apply their findings bit-for-bit.

They have a custom way of doing everything, so certifications for the outside world don’t necessarily apply.

Also, unless such findings are shared in a structured manner (in the form of a research paper or something) then it feels like just a cool story, and I’d be inclined to call bs.

To add my personal anecdotal point of view, getting industry specific certifications (red hat rhcsa, for example) has made me a profoundly better professional, because I had to go over a number of topics and study them thoroughly, way over what the average tutorial covers.

Confirming what we’ve suspected for decades. Certs are a waste of time and money.

Food for thought: So are degrees.

> Food for thought: So are degrees.

I can see why one would disagree with this if they read "So is an education" so I think it's worth pointing out the difference. Degrees are the thing that are corrupted by Goodhart's law (consider the increase in cost of college tuition; people are so eager to spend more because they're trying to hit a target) and an education can only be faked as well as an individual can bullshit.

People with long About blurbs on their LinkedIn profiles tend to be weaker as well.

really? i fond longer texts useful if they contain interesting details about the work of the person. shorter ones always leave me wondering who that person is.

Really. I think this sums it up: https://devrant.com/rants/1807864/reality-vs-linkedin-profil...

Guys who spend a lot on self-promotion are tryhards. The really strong workers don't need to promote because their work history speaks for itself.

ok, yes, i know that joke. but not everyone is doing that, and sometimes those descriptions are just interesting.

As are people with 500+ connections.

We can all make arbitrary heuristics. And we do.

That is interesting data, but it's not that clear that you can derive actionable advice from it — particularly for employee candidates themselves.

Is it the listing of certifications that is inversely correlated with the career progress of the employee? Or is it because listing a certification is strongly correlated to having one, with this being what is truly inversely correlated with career progress? And, if so, in what direction is the cause-effect?

Maybe the tendency to list certifications is correlated to certain personality or attitude that is less likely to progress. Or maybe it is accumulating certifications that is correlated to this. In that case, by not listing them, the candidate will succeed in hiding this fact from potential employers, which may help him or her.

However, what if it is not progressing in one's career that makes one more likely to list (or accumulate) certifications in an effort to compensate? And in that case, all else being equal, maybe the would-be certification-lister would be even worse off were they not to list it!

For a silly analogy, I'm betting that, among users of dating apps, total time spent on them is inversely proportional to the probability of being in a long-term relationship at some point in a given timeframe. However, that does not necessarily mean that using them for long has any causal effect on reducing one's chances.

I agree.

I think it depends on what's observable by the recruiter. If productivity is highly observable, say, from good or bad letters of rec or experience, then you would see certificates negatively correlate with ability but they would have very little informational content. And you would be able to mistakenly have a certificate without it hurting you, since they can see your true ability.

If productivity is not observable, then yes, adding a certificate would hurt you, but it's hard to imagine any separating equilibrium where this pattern is sustained. Everyone should have a certificate or no one should.

That's assuming perfect rationality, though. I would guess people who post certificates don't get how the labor market really functions, while people who don't post them do get it. Knowledge of how the labor market really functions is correlated with ability. So you get a separating equilibrium because a subset of people are ignorant. And I think this is kind of the logic the original article is getting at.

Data was also collected at Google, which itself is an outlier.

An average business certainly won't have the same recruiting pipeline as Google, to say the least.

Agrees with my own experience. The more you have to proclaim your own competence, the less of it there likely is. As Shakespeare said, "the lady doth protest too much".

That sounds like a shitty job at de-biasing the input data.

This study buckets candidates into certs vs no-certs and then looks at average performance. It might be interesting to look at performance buckets and then calculate the percentage that list certs or not.

> measured as career progress

But that's circular. Career progress is not necessarily correlated with actual performance. The latter is really hard to separate from politics. It is possible to have a stellar career while being a mediocre performer if you know how to work the system and have a bit of good luck. Likewise, it's possible to be an outstanding performer and have a mediocre or even non-existent career if you don't happen to be in the right place at the right time, or if you rub the wrong person the wrong way.

To me, this alone could also be a collider/Berkson's paradox: Conditioning on making the cut, there is a negative correlation because you make the cut by either being extremely skillful or by having great certifications – one compensates the other. That in turn would mean that certifications are actually positively correlated with getting employed at Google.

You need the full picture, that is people not making the cut to exclude this pattern.

Having taken a number of certifications myself, I can say this is not surprising. Certifications have long been used as a means of keeping the labor pool concentrated, and in the interest of limiting those who should be qualified to receive it (based on knowledge) to those that pay the most, there are often structural issues that make certifications as a whole useless to an employer.

The employer is paying a higher price, for no real benefit.

As an example, I've helped IT staff prepare for certification on email systems and have over 5 years of direct experience specializing in that area. They received their certifications no issues, but they paid the high priced business class which included the test. I paid for just the test when I went to test, and I was failed. It wasn't a matter of not knowing the material, there were structural issues that appeared intentional, and there is no incentive to fix those issues. When I say structural, I'm talking about system's theory properties such as determinism not being present (a property any valid test should have).

In fact measures that normal businesses enact to maintain accountability to avoid lawsuits that every business has, they've removed because they are legally shielded with no real due process. They'll string you along for 3 months before giving you a credit, when you can prove they misrepresented many things.

They have such legal protection that you either pay the toll, or you don't get a temporary qualification to work. Its sad, but this interference in employer-employee relations for profit at your expense is common, and unavoidable due to monopoly/oligopoly.

If I were a CTO involved in hiring, knowing what I know, I would not hire based on certifications. It only shows that you either have persistence or paid more money upfront, nothing more. The marketing being pushed for certifications towards business is fraudulent in many cases, and is not representative of skills.

Do certifications inversely correlate with careers success, or do certifications inversely correlate with age? Older engineers probably don't have heaps of certs because they can fill a resume with prior experience. Additionally, Coursera/Udemy/edX and the like are relatively new and it's more likely that younger people would take more advantage of them. A junior engineer compensates lack of experience by using education and certs as evidence. The key part here is that older engineers are more likely to be senior, and by extension have "greater career success". That doesn't mean there's a direct correlation between certs and success.

I think there's a whole bunch of control variables to worry about before we could take anything meaningful from that data.