It’s friday evening and I just finalized the cleaning of a room from all old stuff. Freeing a room from collected garbage is like freeing your mind from all those topics that can make you crazy.

It’s raining outside, it’s dark outside and I am sitting in front of my computer and read all the mails and news I missed.

  • The best offering of a new job. The company was happy to find me at linkedin. Yeehaa … deleted!
  • Next message. People like me are wanted. By so wonderful companies. Sweet … deleted!
  • Oh wow… Am I a certified whatever? I will get more certifications? Hmm… interesting. Let’s check, what kind of certificates I can gather.

Certification bullshit

Hard headline and no, I don’t mean all certifications. But hey, in my life I have had so many bad experiences with people, with a long list of certified this and super-duper certified that. And the best experience with people, they just know what they did and do.

Examples

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional

I only have the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certificate. But I work all day with AWS, digging into issues, find solutions for a lot of different challenges, stay up-to-date, lead a community and pay a lot of my private money to evaluate and replay scenarios. In short, AWS is my passion. Now I should challenge people with the professional certificate. I know, this exam you can’t pass without having experience. But what should I tell people, with that certificate, if they do not know the most common best practices of a good AWS infrastructure solution and won’t be able to deploy an API Gateway with a “Hello World” Lambda in the background?

Scrum-Master

I personally hate Scrum-Master. Maybe I can mitigate this to “I don’t like” Scrum-Master. But did you ever had a Scrum-Master that are the money or time worth listen to them? Please get me right, in projects, especially with multiple roles it is important to have someone who keep track on all those stuff, which is next to the “coding” or “testing”. But if you are talking about your project or product, do you say “we” or “we and them”? That’s the difference. If you act as one team, you can get rid of a Scrum-Master. If you still have the feeling, that “we and them” is predominant, than work on your mindset. Yes, this can also be supported by a Scrum-Master, but there are serveral others who can change the mindset of your team without knowing the principles of Scrum.

“I was present” Certificates

Oh my god. Are you kidding? You did a SAP course and now you know SAP. You will NEVER know SAP, after a half day training course. A tiny little bit. Cool, you are a security specialist because you listened to someone called “white hat” and you got a nice piece of paper? Network Specialist. Crazy, you can configure a router, wireless LAN and ok, maybe you also know a little bit auf the OSI Layer 8 ;-)

Back from being annoyed

Sorry to all, which were able to read until here. To be honest, next to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate I also own the Novell Netware Certified Administrator. Both of them I only made because I was personally challenged by teammate.

Why sorry?

A certificate is most of the time only a worthless piece of paper, if you are not working with passion on that topic. A certificate only tell, that the one, who owns it, was able to pass the exam. It does not tell, how long was the preparation, how often the person missed it. Did that person really work with that products or services. It tells you nothing about that person.

While I was cleaning the room, I found some holes at the wall. I don’t want to put a certificate to hide it. I will held it open to always remember that work with passion is more worth, than having a certificate.