Are there any certifications you view negatively?
Are there any certifications you view negatively?
And does it matter if they show up on applicants LinkedIn profiles or just resumes?
(I know some ATS slurp up LinkedIn profile data, but not sure how prominently it's shown.)
I view all of them equally negatively in the sense that I don’t care about them at all. When I’m hiring I’m looking at experience, not pieces of paper (certs or degrees). More corporate companies probably do care more though, at least in the automated portion of their hiring funnel.
Though with that said, from anecdotal experience, a lot of certifications tends to be a red flag as I’ve found those to usually be the weakest candidates.
For standard software development jobs I think they’re completely unnecessary, but I could see something like an AWS cert being valued for a dev-ops job though I’ve never hired for dev-ops so I can’t speak from experience there…
I agree. In my experience certifications had a strong correlation with weak candidates.
And I also agree there could be some exceptions.
I have a master's in CS. Currently teaching freshman/sophomore level courses, and have regularly done little side projects and internships in development. However, my only *career * experience is in desktop support and operations. Since I've been out of the game to focus on the master's degree and my programming chops, I thought I would try for a Networking+ and Security+ to better poise myself for a DevOps position. This thread has me seriously second-guessing that career plan.
Certs for me can be a net negative - if you have one, I expect you to know shit. An answer of "I don't know, but here's my take on it" is a good answer in my book, because we can't all know everything and I'm generally more interested in attitude and thought process than pure knowledge. But that changes when you are certified and brag about it on your resume. That bar goes higher, for no apparent gain to be honest. Example: if you have "certified AWS Foo Bar" and you don't know what a vpc is, that's a red flag for me. It wouldn't be otherwise, even if you had AWS experience listed, because maybe you were just working with ECS and didn't need to know jack shit about vpcs.
About the only situation in which a cert is a plus is when you have close to zero relevant experience. But all of the above still applies.