Becoming Clout* certified

Hot takes about my experience with cloud certifications

For me, December 2023 was the month of the cloud. I was able to acquire *cue not-so-humble brag* 3 certifications in that month — namely the GCP Associate cloud engineer, AWS solutions architect associate, and the AWS data engineer associate. While I was out collecting these certs I had some ... thoughts and opinions. Thoughts and opinions which I would like to grace you with.

Given that the best things come in threes, I have decided to divide my thoughts into 3 certified illusions — let’s call them:

• The illusion of knowledge
• The illusion of value
• The illusion of prestige

The illusion of knowledge

I have never used AWS EMR, and if you had asked me to set up an EMR cluster before or after I started preparing for the data engineering certification I doubt there would have been any change in how I would have gone about that task. The knowledge that I gained from the certification process essentially replaced the first Google search of “what is AWS EMR”, though very little beyond that.

But why? When considering the questions in the exams — especially the data engineering exam, which I consider to be more in-depth than the other 2 — it is clear that some questions require a good knowledge of the core concepts.

For me, the elephant in the room here is websites (you know the ones) on which you can easily find an abundance of exam questions and community-sourced answers. An associate of mine said it best:

after a while, you need to decide to stop studying to understand and start studying to pass the exam

Where studying to pass the exam means memorizing answers and looking for patterns as opposed to truly internalizing the concepts. It is a valid critique to say — well you chose to prepare in this way, you could have simply not looked at those websites. But the fact that these resources exist in the first place means that people will exploit them, it is inevitable. The ‘system’ incentivizes us to pass — by any means.

By calling it an illusion I am implying that someone is being fooled. However, this is typically not the person who went through the certification process. The one who did the certification will in general be well aware of what they know and what they don’t.

I think the groups that are fooled most by this illusion are:

• Those who are still browsing the certification options and take the statement “by achieving this certification you will prove your knowledge to do X” imply that by studying for and taking the certification they will, through the process gain the knowledge to do X.
• Those who are responsible for hiring and staffing. They too can easily fall into the trap of imagining competency where there is none if they blindly equate the presence of a certification with the presence of knowledge.

The illusion of value

The reason why my December played out the way it did was because I was in between projects and as such I needed to find a way to add value to the company I work for.

How exactly does one go about adding value? It is an open-ended question — a real head-scratcher. And then… the answer descends from the heavens: “Just get a certification”. This is a simple and concrete answer so it’s easy for us to accept — even though it may not always be correct.

Why do we consider gaining a certification to be a value adder? I can think of two main reasons for this:

The first is I think quite sensible and straightforward — if your company is working towards a cloud partnership program or if having certifications makes it easier for you to “sell” yourself to a client then I think there is some actual value to be gained (no illusion here).

The second reason I think we consider it to be a value adder is because certification => knowledge => value. If you gain a certification, you gain knowledge and that knowledge will be of value to you and to the peers you share it with. This sounds good, but we know from the previous illusion that the link between certification and knowledge is itself NOT a given, and if that’s the case… well you can see how this house of cards can come tumbling down.

But, it is hard for me to make the case that gaining a certification could result in NO value being added to you or your organization. I think there is always going to be at least some positive impact. What we need to consider here is the opportunity cost of spending our time gaining certifications. There are other valuable things we could do with our time but typically these alternatives are more vaguely defined and harder to show off than certifications and as such may be overlooked.

The illusion of prestige

At some point, you may have seen a photo of North Korean army generals decked out from head to … knee in medals. That is what I felt like when I added the 3 new badges to my LinkedIn profile.

It’s human nature I think, to want to collect and show off shiny things ( we are tax-paying crows) and for software engineers, cloud certifications have been designed to tap into that desire.

I, like many in the profession, feel imposter syndrome. It may seem like certifications can help to eliminate some of these feelings and help us gain a bit of confidence. However, my experience was quite the inverse. After gaining these certifications I feel like more of an imposter because now I have these badges but don’t feel I have the knowledge to back them up. I imagine those army generals feel the same way.

But where is the illusion I hear you ask. Well, I think the victim of this illusion is ourselves. By gaining these certifications we may think we are gaining a level of prestige and respect in the eyes of our peers. However, the chances are that the same people we are trying most to impress and to gain credibility from, have been through a certification journey themselves and as such can recognize it for what it is.

So… Certifications are pointless?

Well no obviously not.

The reason I spent so much time seemingly bashing certifications in my illusions is mainly because I want to bring a bit of realism into the discussion. There is still knowledge to be gained, value to be gleaned and prestige to be gathered from certifications but I think that we need to be aware of the illusions at play to know to avoid them. I will admit that I fell prey to these traps so I want to give you a fighting chance in avoiding them.

Can the system be fixed?

Taking a very optimistic stance: yes it can be fixed. Amazon, Google, and the rest can change how they structure their exams. The current MCQ approach combined with slowly changing exams and a large number of test takers means that the test takers are winning this arms race. Perhaps GenAI can be leveraged here to allow for automated grading of open-ended questions or to increase the pool of possible questions to the point that it becomes infeasible to simply memorize answers.

Another approach could be the introduction of an additional tier of exams which are graded by human examiners — this could allow for a deeper probing of the test takers’ knowledge and would result in a more trusted certification — something more kin to a university examination style. This would of course come at a higher cost.

Imagining how these big corporations can fix themselves is a fun exercise but not that realistic I think.

I think that this is a case where we should rather focus on changing ourselves and our expectations of the system than the system itself. And, I believe that this starts from the illusions I mentioned before. We need to be a bit introspective and ask ourselves the following questions:

• Am I committed to truly engaging with the subject matter or am I just here for the prize?
• What value do I wish to gain from this certification and is it more than I would gain from doing something else?
• Am I just doing this to make my LinkedIn profile look sexier?

If you can answer these questions in a way you are happy with, then by all means go ahead and get certified — but if you can’t …I suggest you take a step back *breath* and reconsider.

To cover all my bases 😅, I just want to add that my experiences were with associate-level certifications only. I may have come out with a completely different outlook on the subject if I instead focused on the more demanding professional tranche of certifications.

Another caveat, I took these certifications after already having worked with cloud technologies for some time. If you are right at the start of your career I imagine you will have a different experience with these certifications and may find them helpful in structuring your initial learnings about the cloud. Just remember that the real value is in the journey not the the destination.