Founders, Employers, Developers: Certifications or Github - what matters more during tech interviews?
Recently I came across an interesting thread on reddit about certification vs degree.
During my long dev career, I always had mixture of experience regarding outcomes of certification vs other online portfolios mainly Github.
While many disregard certifications as trash, I still feel they have special place in hottest / legacy techs, such as Information Security, Cisco Networking, and recently cloud, data science etc. In the past I witnessed time when Java and MS certificates were game changers. Yet I do not have concrete data to prove their relevance.
OTOH, Github too maybe lately a trash can of copy-paste repos, but many employers consider
something done > something described in the CVs
(at least until we come up with accurate tech to detect code plagiarism. )
I request both employers and developers to help me answer:
1 - To coders and developers who had at least 2 job hops during their career - what do you think was more valuable to you in getting your next job?
Was it a new certification attained, or was it new github repo / contribution on someone else’s work?
2 - To people who have interviewed a few coders in their lifetime:
What made you shortlist interview candidates from their CVs? Was it certification, was it github / some other public portfolio (e.g. SO)?
That said:
I know recruitment has many more facets apart from CVs and portfolios i.e. meetups, hackathons, friend-of-friend recommendations, forum attentions.
But I want to get general idea about what’s mainstream when employers and employees didn’t just bump off into each other, especially in techs where both Github and Certifications are relevant.
I think like you said, for certain IT fields they hold their weight. IT security/Cyber Security or Networking are a lot easier to create "baselines" for becuase you are technically doing the same thing over and over and over. For Devs, that's a little harder to put in a bucket. Everything is changing every day, new frameworks are popping up and people are pushing what is capable. I think if you are trying to get a dev job from outside this space, maybe creating something like an app generating revenue and showing that to an employer might hold its weight higher than going back to school for 4 to 6 years for a CS degree. Just my .02 though