AD Automation

NOTE: This post was originally meant to be a reflection on Pearson Vue's Value of IT Certification report, which is much better and more insightful than what this article ended up being (mostly griping about vibe coding and over-reliance on Copilot). But if you're in the mood for a lot of hot takes about AI stuff, keep reading 😉

I've been working to get a few certifications throughout the past year and a half. I find the cycle of studying and passing each exam to be fun and satisfying. I like how paying for exams ensures I have some skin in the game, so that I'm not just taking and retaking exams mindlessly, but rather putting in effort to ensure that I only have to take each exam once. But I will admit that the “reward” of passing these exams up to this point has pretty much been bragging rights on LinkedIn, and more confidence when talking about software development topics outside my day-to-day RPA work.

While this is a perfectly fine reward for me, I think most people do not see any immediate benefit in their current jobs (promotions, raises, etc) when they pass IT exams. Grinding certifications is far from a cure-all for career dissatisfaction and stagnation. The bigger benefits lie in the future. For the worriers out there, certifications can mean remaining competitive in what is currently the worst job market my generation has seen. Or, more optimistically, certifications can help people stand out in job applications when they are ready to make a change.

In my view, there is a spectrum of what hiring managers value more: projects on one side, and IT certifications on the other. I think it's a fairly safe guess that the average hiring manager would be more compelled by an interesting project, rather than one or two certifications. Although I think hiring managers/teams tend to undervalue certifications, I can understand the opinion that on-hands experience could be a better indicator and predictor of future success.

But in the year of our Lord 2025, personal and professional achievements must now compete with vibe coded slop. Hard work has to compete with reckless, rushed experiments. If both approaches appear to produce “the same product,” then the one that took less time to make will win out, despite the abundance of issues that come with creators having almost no connection to what they made.

I readily admit that my personal projects (e.g. my Blazor apps) have their issues, but I can tell you exactly what each file does, and I would know exactly where to go if any bugs are found. Someone else could vibe code a similar app that looks better and does more things, but if it breaks, the only option this hypothetical vibe coder has is to cross their fingers that Cursor can identify and fix the issue (without creating new bugs).

I think (or at least hope to God) that most people would easily say that asking AI to generate a picture doesn't make them an artist. But some situations just need cheap and fast art, and if a company accidentally uses an AI-generated picture of a person with six fingers, the worst consequence would be a bit of laughter. But in this same vein, I would say that a vibe coder is not a developer. And if a vibe coder were to deploy the code equivalent of a six-fingered person image, mountains of technical debt would be the least of the company's concerns.

But what does this vibe coding rant have to do with certifications? I believe that the harder it is for hard work to be valued in favor of effortless trash, the more important it is to have some way to verify that someone is still committed to learning things themselves. If someone got certified in DevOps, for instance, chances are much higher that their insights come from personal knowledge, rather than from Copilot prompts that are forgotten within minutes of reading.

I am certainly guilty of letting Copilot compensate for my intellectual laziness every now and then, but I work hard to ensure that these moments are rare, rather than a way of life. I am convinced that the only way we improve as people and as developers is if we continue to pursue lifelong learning, and we resist the temptation to let AI do the “learning” for us.

My means to this end is studying for certification exams. Your approach could be different, but whichever way you learn best, the important thing is that we keep exercising our learning muscle. There are a few studies, like the one in this TIME article that suggest that excessive ChatGPT usage could be weakening our ability to think critically. I'd like to not end up as one of those statistics, and I imagine you also feel the same way.