Pro tip: stopped chasing certs after a senior dev told me to read code instead
I spent 8 months grinding AWS certs in Seattle thinking that was the path to a promotion. Then a senior dev I respect said, 'nobody cares about your badges, we care if you can debug a memory leak.' He showed me a real incident from our production system and I froze, knew zero about the actual stack. I still study, but now 2 nights a week I just read open source repos related to my job instead of watching another course. Has anyone else hit that wall where training felt productive but was actually avoiding the hard work?
My buddy did the exact same thing, racked up like 6 certs in a year and a half while his team was drowning in Kafka issues he couldn't touch. His lead finally sat him down and said the certs weren't the problem, it was that he'd never actually traced a message through the pipeline end to end. He switched to reading the Kafka source on weekends and within 3 months he was the guy people pinged when stuff broke. The badges never came up in his review once.