Years ago I had a discussion with a friend and former Boeing colleague who had recently been hired by Microsoft as a developer. I asked him about the interview process. His reply was enlightening at the time and I ended up using bits and pieces of it to make future hires when I managed a small tools team at Xerox.

The crux of it was, they don’t care so much about what you’ve done in the past. They are more interested in knowing how you approach problems now. You get almost zero credit for having been involved in complex projects listed on your resume. In the interview process you’re more likely to be tested on how you would approach a real world problem. Getting the answer exactly right isn’t as important as how well you rise to the challenge and bring forth ideas and communicate them. I definitely saw the value in this.

This has nothing to do with coming up with “stump the developer” questions which are irritating as hell. It’s more about trying to figure out how a candidate’s mind works. When I started using the process myself I oftentimes walked away from an interview session getting a really good feel for if given a problem, the candidate can take the magic marker and start sketching out ideas vs. me having to lead the discussion from beginning to end. Very telling.

After about 30 years in the biz I realized that less and less of my formal education mattered at all to my career. By the end of 42 years I can easily say that < 1% of my BSEET degree from 1986 was in use as a Site Reliability Engineer in 2022. In addition to that I realized that I was having to reinvent myself every 5-10 years as technology changed and new roles opened up. This is a far cry from my father’s work world of teaching 8th grade math for 33 years. Math doesn’t change much from year to year unless the textbooks change. Must have been nice!

It certainly appears that the educational landscape has changed as far as employers are concerned. Nowadays you see more postings with Computer Science degree or equivalent. If I were newly unemployed or otherwise wanting to boost my resume I think I would focus on Cloud Certifications from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. In my view these are as valuable to an employer’s immediate needs as just about anything else you’ll put on your resume.

I don’t want to discount the value of a Computer Science Degree though. While it’s true that just having that sheepskin doesn’t necessity correlate to a more valuable employee, what it does do is tell you that the candidate had the stick-to-it mindset in order to get through something very challenging to get. And that’s definitely worth a lot.

But as far as employers are concerned, I suspect they are oftentimes looking closely at skills match for the purpose of knowing “okay, how much are we going to have to teach this person?”

Focusing solely on skills-match is a huge mistake. For one thing, people lie. Putting python on your resume might check the box but it doesn’t really tell you the level of complexity of the python programs that were developed. For that you have to rely on good interview questions and even then, you might not be getting a fair comparison.

The Certifications however tell a completely different story. For one thing, it’s necessary to have spent time hands on with the services you’re being tested on. The other thing is the tests are not easy. If you pass a certification test, you’ve done some studying and learned some things that an employer can potentially use right away.

If you’re looking to get ahead these days, chase the certs.