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Shoutout to my old boss who told me I was wasting my time on certifications
Had coffee with my ex-manager from 2019 last week and she said I should stop chasing certificates and just build stuff. She showed me her GitHub with 12 real projects that got her a senior role, and that hit me hard because I've spent like $800 on courses this year alone with nothing to show for it. Anyone else ditch the certs and just start building?
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grant1555h ago
My buddy spent $1200 on AWS certs last year and still couldn't land a job. He switched to building a simple app over two weekends, posted it on LinkedIn, and got three interview invites. Your ex-manager is right. Certificates prove you can pass a test, not that you can solve real problems. Employers want to see what you've actually made.
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wren_mitchell5h ago
Traded studying for a weekend project myself. Built a dumb little weather app that pulled data from a free API and showed it on a map. Put it on GitHub with a readme that basically said "here's what I did and why it was harder than I expected." Got two recruiter DMs that week. One of them flat out told me they liked that I struggled through something real and wrote about it instead of listing certs.
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You ever notice how building something messy and real always beats a perfect test score? @wren_mitchell nailed it, people connect with the struggle and the story behind it. My advice, pick one small problem you actually have and make a janky fix for it, even if it's ugly.
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