Do Certifications Matter in Software Development?
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Security, IT and other fields have certifications, should we care about software development?
Certificate please! As companies realize the importance of developers learning outside of work by attending conferences, reading books and taking courses, do developers need certificates as well? Follow up to that, what certifications actually matter?
Too many certifications
One issue with certifications is a lot of them exist. As of now you can get certifications from Coursera courses, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, and several other companies.
Now looking at the above statement you see two cloud platforms listed with vastly different services. So if you wanted to use multiple clouds within an organization you need both certifications on a individual or multiple people with one certification. Which is a pain to maintain especially when technologies are changing rapidly. Just an example that shows how two certifications is already overwhelming for a single part of an engineers technology stack.
Finally if you want to do a catch all certification for software engineer like Springboard, is it worthwhile to do 800 hours of work? After reading through the course most concepts surround web development with frameworks. However, where is the discussion about design patterns (different from frameworks), clean code, designing APIs, requirements gathering and etc. Bootcamp certifications aim to just land you a junior role and so many exist that it’s difficult to determine which is best.
Obviously the more reputable and highly rated a course then it’s better. I suggest to find courses that separate themselves from the pack and have a track record of proven success.
Proving your knowledge
So at the moment knowledge is proved through the rigorous interview process for software engineers. Just to give a brief example, last interview cycle I had a 30 minute phone screening, 1 hour video call with a coding problem/behavioral chat, 5 hour session with several video calls with coding, architectural, and behavioral questions, and finally 2 calls for meeting teams each 1 hour a piece. Phew catch all that? Drum roll please, that totals 8.5 hours of interviewing. Granted last 2 hours were…
