I am a certification monkey

I am a certification monkey. Yes, I am.

For years I was studying that AWS, Azure and GCP are the best clouds in the world. That they have a solution for everything and that their tools are the best of the best, built under heavy performance pressure where being the least productive developer can actually cost you your job. But this is how it really works.

Certifications were popularized years ago by big companies like Cisco and Microsoft. The idea was simple: if someone gets their approval badge, that person will promote their technologies everywhere, because they invested time and effort into learning them. At least that was the theory. The next step was even smarter. Vendors started giving customers discounts if they hired a “certified professional”, and that is how the loop closed. People learn technologies, people get certified, people get hired, companies stay vendor locked, and vendors give a discount on products that are already massively overpriced.

Most big tech companies do not build everything from scratch anyway. They buy already established products and teams and integrate them into their enterprise landscape. Cisco with Splunk, Google with Apigee, and hundreds of other acquisitions that later magically become “native cloud services”.

Today the process is usually very simple. You pick a certification, open the curriculum, get overwhelmed by jargon, learn that object storage has three different names in three different clouds, go to a popular test dump site, memorize answers, pass the exam, get certified, and still do not really understand what is going on.

Almost every test based exam from major tech companies is leaked online. This is not a secret, it is an industry reality. If Microsoft exams are dumped, why would Amazon or Google be any different? Some companies literally force employees to get certified because it reduces cloud costs. So of course cloud providers want as many certified people as possible. Lower barriers mean more adoption and more revenue.

Just to be clear, I am not attacking people. I know many hardworking engineers who studied honestly and really understood the material. CCNA, for example, is still a very solid way to get into networking, sometimes better than a university course. This is not about shaming learners, it is about recognizing a corporate incentive loop that exists to maximize profit.

I personally spent days reading documentation, thousands of pages. And still, I do not value myself or my certifications just because I passed an exam. The value of a certification depends entirely on where you look from. Some roles are certification blocked by default, and talented people can be filtered out at the CV stage just because they do not have the right badge.

That said, if you are looking for personal training for AWS, Azure, or GCP certifications, I am extremely eager to help. I am a very experienced monkey.