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.