I passed the Triplebyte Android certification, but in addition to my general software experience, I only prototyped an android app. (It didn't have real functionality.) I passed the Triplebyte Android certification, but in addition to my general software experience, I prototyped an iOS app and made a fully functional iOS app. (Well, it's a React Native app, but I used iOS libraries and wrote special Objective-C to bind them together.) I also passed the Triplebyte Generalist and Frontend certifications.
As a recruiter or hirer, how does a Triplebyte certification factor into a resume? As a developer, did you pass the certification and how much experience did you have?
- If they have the certs and they look decent on code samples or architectural questions, it's probably fine, but the certs have little to no impact on this
- If they only have the certs but no personal projects, no contributions to open source, absolutely no code samples, the certs are probably just for show and pointless
I've seen numerous cases where people have every single edX/Triplebyte/whatever cert in existence but are orders of magnitude worse than a first year CS student.
NB: HR usually forces basic screening of anything before I see it; including basic recruiter given online coding tests/basic algorithm stuff.
I personally hate whiteboarding, and I hate whiteboarding others. I usually do deep what-if questions, akin to asking for things like explanations of tree shaking or promises vs async/await for frontend devs, or figuring out if they know how to actually use devtools for anything like profiling, memory usage, service workers, etc. I've found that this usually results in better selection (and more tolerable teammates) compared to whiteboarding where you can kind of just rote-memorisation the test while having absolutely no idea how to do anything.
As a frontend example, someone that has done performance profiling and analysis, heap snapshotting/sampling and the ability to read them (yes, those tabs in devtools that for some reason almost no one uses) has a significantly higher chance of being knowledgeable, IMO.
I think certifications should not be given with the criteria of "top X%", but should have a clear score threshold (above X score).
Because even knowing the hardness of their test would not give me clear indication as to how the candidate actually performed. Only relatively.
Based on this I usually give very less weight to certificates like that.