Vue certification

[Soviut]

I'm a full stack developer who leans more towards frontend and Vue has been my framework of choice since the very beginning. I've done plenty of React, but I just find Vue friendlier and more forgiving, especially when working with devlopers who have less frontend experience.

 

But why be just a self-professed expert when you can be a certified expert? Vue is launching their certification program and I figured I'd give it a shot. It costs money (aroung $500 USD including access to study materials), but that's a write-off anyway. There are two tiers; developer and senior developer. The exam is serious enough to require a proctor to watch you via webcam while you take the test. The coding exercises are written in Stackblitz (Node environment in the browser), no Google allowed, but access to the Vue docs is allowed.

 

Certification for a frontend framework feels somewhat exotic since it's an open source project and it's not "enterprise" (eg: database certification). I'm wondering if anyone else has experience getting certified for something like this? How did it go?

[riklaunim]

Usually, certification is useless. It would have to become highly recognizable to have value in a recruitment process.

[Soviut]

1 hour ago, riklaunim said:

Usually, certification is useless. It would have to become highly recognizable to have value in a recruitment process.

In certain cases I agree, in others I disagree. There are plenty of certifications that do matter; the aforementioned database certifications, for example. If I'm paying hundreds of dollars an hour for database support, I'd definitely want it being provided by an accredited expert. Likewise, I wouldn't want to eat at a restaurant where the staff didn't pass their healthy and safety certification, etc.

 

I see it less as a tool for getting hired and more as a tool to be taken seriously when dealing with management. Especially in large FAANG-type companies there are a lot of layers of terminally risk-averse managers all trying to cover their asses. When you can make a technical proposal as a contractor you can shorten a lot of "are you sure?" meetings by metaphorically pointing at your certification.

 

This isn't a hypothetical either. At one particular company I was contracting, I literally spent an 8 hours one day in meetings explaining over and over how the "provide/consume" pattern works in React to 4 layers of team leads. Given they're leading a React project you'd think they'd be experts in the framework, but they all had misunderstandings about how the pattern worked and assumed I was missing something as well.

 

I'm not saying a certificate would solve these issues all the time, but people tend to take the word of someone with accredited a little more seriously.

[ToboRobot]

12 hours ago, Soviut said:

 If I'm paying hundreds of dollars an hour for database support, I'd definitely want it being provided by an accredited expert. Likewise, I wouldn't want to eat at a restaurant where the staff didn't pass their healthy and safety certification, etc.

I want competent support.  I don't care what cert or degree they have.  I don't care if the chef has a Red Seal, I want the kitchen to be clean and the food tasty.

Certifications are proxies for competence.  Once you meet someone who has a certification but is incompetent (it happens more than you'd like in every industry), you stop looking for certifications and start looking for competence.

I went to college for Cybersecurity and they changed their certification from Cisco networking to CompTIA Network +, because with the same instructors and curriculum, more students were passing the tests. 

They weren't selecting for competence, or training to overcome a lack of it, but finding an easy certification that most people could pass.

FYI: Vue is the product of Pearson a big education company, and this is a pivot from the textbook business to extract profit from the education industry.

[riklaunim]

14 hours ago, Soviut said:

In certain cases I agree, in others I disagree.

For software development meaningful certification exists only for some software stacks, usually commercial from Microsoft, Oracle, and alike. Java in the banking market also often uses/requires various certificates. Other software stacks not so much, usually, it boils down to the recruitment process verifying your skills, and doing a code review.

[WWicket]

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 ...taken seriously when dealing with management. Especially in large FAANG-type companies...

At FAANG and I know 0 engineering managers that would care about this cert //

[Soviut]

On 7/28/2023 at 6:57 PM, WWicket said:

At FAANG and I know 0 engineering managers that would care about this cert //

I realized it isn't something that's going to matter to everyone, but it's also brand new and fairly uncommon in this space (frontend web). But man oh man, do I wish there was certification for React; none of those managers I had would have passed. Literally asking "is the provider pattern just global variables?" and "won't that cause the entire app to re-render?".

 

Most of them don't consider frontend development serious work until their app chugs because they fundamentally don't understand React's rendering model. Considering how risk-averse management is, this is a real blind spot. Because it's a blind spot, people don't usually take you seriously when you're knowledgeable on the topic because their lack of knowledge means they can't verify if what you're telling them is true. A certification, in this case, might help.

[Soviut]

On 7/28/2023 at 11:17 AM, riklaunim said:

For software development meaningful certification exists only for some software stacks, usually commercial from Microsoft, Oracle, and alike. Java in the banking market also often uses/requires various certificates. Other software stacks not so much, usually, it boils down to the recruitment process verifying your skills, and doing a code review.

Given how mission-critical I've seen frontend become, it's starting to make sense. My first week of contracting for a large organization I saw their team of 400 cut down to 50 due in large part to performance issues with the app on mobile.

 

Another real-world example; Shoppers Drug Mart's online shop won't display any products if you're running a PiHole (and probably anything that blocks tracking scripts) because it causes their analytics to crash mid-fetch. Their untested analytics capture rendered their store unusable.

 

I'm not saying certification will solve every problem, but it could help to start convincing higher ups that hiring qualified frontend devs is more important than they originally thought.

[Soviut]

On 7/28/2023 at 10:00 AM, ToboRobot said:

I don't care if the chef has a Red Seal, I want the kitchen to be clean and the food tasty.

Right, but a clean kitchen is what certification from health inspectors guarantees.

 

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They weren't selecting for competence, or training to overcome a lack of it, but finding an easy certification that most people could pass.

Sure, any system can be gamed. However, that doesn't disqualify all certifications. It's a baseline, like a clean kitchen. There are a lot of self-professed "experts" out that that turn out not to be. While those who got a second opinion and got certified generally don't wind up being incompetent. There are always going to be exceptions; you might not get sick from that restaurant that failed their health inspection, but it's even less likely for one that passed.

 

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FYI: Vue is the product of Pearson a big education company, and this is a pivot from the textbook business to extract profit from the education industry.

I looked it up; Pearson Vue is an exam product. I'm talking about Vue the web framework (like Angular, React, etc.). They are unrelated.

[NocTheRocc]

2 hours ago, Soviut said:

Right, but a clean kitchen is what certification from health inspectors guarantees.

I don't think this analogy makes sense, health inspections are regularly occurring checks to ensure public safety. Certifications are about hiring.

 

I think this comes down to what kind of jobs you're looking for. I think most of the responses you will get from software engineers about certifications will be negative because that's not who they're for. Certifications let hiring managers who don't have a technical background filter out bad candidates even if they can't directly assess skills. This is useful in areas like IT in small organizations where the hiring manager is very unlikely to have an IT background.

 

In software engineering this is fairly uncommon. The problem evaporates when the manager has a technical background and can do a better job of assessing the candidate than the certification program (which I would argue is very easy to do). Worse yet, certifications can actively harm your resume if the hiring manager has a technical background. Imagine you're an expert in technology Y, and you get a resume that lists a certification in Y that you've never heard of. Your response is going to be suspicion about whether this certification means anything if every expert you know has never heard of it, and you may wonder why the candidate would bother with a such a strange certification and list it on their application to your company.

 

So this boils down to whether you think it's valuable to have a better looking resume specifically at companies where you may be one of the only technical staff and will be hired by someone non-technical.

 

[Soviut]

On 7/30/2023 at 7:50 AM, NocTheRocc said:

The problem evaporates when the manager has a technical background and can do a better job of assessing the candidate than the certification program (which I would argue is very easy to do). Worse yet, certifications can actively harm your resume if the hiring manager has a technical background. Imagine you're an expert in technology Y, and you get a resume that lists a certification in Y that you've never heard of.

 

I've been going through the training for the cert and it covers a lot of deep topics the average Vue developer won't be familiar with in day-to-day use. Unless they're writing plugins for Vue, they won't have the skills to fully evaluate mine. At the very least, the cert indicates that they can skip the simpler questions in an interview. Also, a lot of my work is contract work, so there's no interview. Having a cert means I can propose using Vue and get less pushback.

 

To reiterate my anecdote; while contracting at a FAANG company that was building a React app, I wound up having to teach very technical people the "provide/consume" pattern. It's right there in the React docs, but none of them knew it and none of them believed my explanation when I first built the feature that used it. These managers with technical backgrounds did not, in fact, have the skills to evaluate mine.

 

As for clueless experts, I'd really hope that if someone is an expert in Vue they'd have heard of the Vue certification. Otherwise that's a red flag that they're not really aware of what's going on in a relatively small ecosystem, and is a good reason for me to end the interview.

[wasab]

careful of certification. sometimes it paradoxically makes you less desirable to employers. 

[Woddell]

On 8/3/2023 at 12:21 AM, Soviut said:

I've been going through the training for the cert and it covers a lot of deep topics the average Vue developer won't be familiar with in day-to-day use. Unless they're writing plugins for Vue, they won't have the skills to fully evaluate mine. At the very least, the cert indicates that they can skip the simpler questions in an interview. Also, a lot of my work is contract work, so there's no interview. Having a cert means I can propose using Vue and get less pushback.

 

To reiterate my anecdote; while contracting at a FAANG company that was building a React app, I wound up having to teach very technical people the "provide/consume" pattern. It's right there in the React docs, but none of them knew it and none of them believed my explanation when I first built the feature that used it. These managers with technical backgrounds did not, in fact, have the skills to evaluate mine.

 

As for clueless experts, I'd really hope that if someone is an expert in Vue they'd have heard of the Vue certification. Otherwise that's a red flag that they're not really aware of what's going on in a relatively small ecosystem, and is a good reason for me to end the interview.

 

I get what you're saying, but your comment about " Having a cert means I can propose using Vue and get less pushback." only works if the employer knows about the certification. Most don't and/or don't care. The only certifications I've seen people bother will is cloud/networking (AWS, Azure, CompTIA, etc) mainly because it's hard to assess competency in those areas without certs. 

 

It's also plausible that a Vue 'expert' wouldn't know about the certification as it's not immediately obvious from their documentation page.