Unraveling the Maze of Cloud Certification with ExamPro's Andrew Brown - C2C028

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast. Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach as individuals who have already started this journey. We would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Cables to Clouds. I'm your host this week, tim McConne, and with me are my beautiful co-hosts, chris Miles and Alex Perkins, and with us this week we have another beautiful, amazing guest with us, andrew Brown. You probably have seen Andrew Brown on Twitter unless you're not on Twitter, in which case you might have seen him on LinkedIn or somewhere else but we got Andrew with us today and go ahead and introduce yourself, andrew, if you don't mind.

Speaker 3: 1:03

Hey everyone, I'm Andrew Brown. I create cloud certification courses. I'm the chief we'll say education officer, I'm CEO, so that's the stand for something for exam pro. I run cloud boot camps, I do a lot of community work and, again, I like to create a lot of cloud drama.

Speaker 2: 1:22

So yeah, Awesome, We'll be tapping into the spicy takes tonight from you, Andrew. So actually the reason we brought Andrew here is because we wanted to talk tonight about cloud education, education, training, certification. So he seemed like kind of the perfect guest to talk about that. A guy who creates certification and exam material, has his own platform and everything. So I guess we'll just jump right in and we'll see kind of where the conversation takes us. So recently on Twitter, I know that you had mentioned kind of how the cloud certification some of the providers have been kind of circling the wagons on a lot of the certification content and kind of bringing it more in-house or at the very least, if not bringing it in-house, then certainly not doing anything to kind of showcase other creators out there who are creating content and creating certification materials. So I mean, just I've said it, but I'd love to hear from your own mouth. Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 3: 2:33

Yeah. So I mean, I recently had made a post where I was complaining on LinkedIn and Twitter saying, you know, I'm only seeing AWS only ever promote their internal content and they're never mentioning all these amazing creators that fill all the other gaps that they're not filling, bringing all those other perspectives. And also are the folks that are probably making AWS as popular as it is, or, you know, this goes the same for any provider, and I use the words. I would say that they're cannibalizing the third-party community-driven content, because they are trying to drive all content through their own funnel, have 100% control of it, 100% of the narration in terms of how and what you should learn and specifically about AWS.

Speaker 3: 3:23

And it's frustrating, especially when I'm running these giant community projects. Like Tim, you might have heard of my AWS Cloud Project Bootcamp, where I literally spent $70 to $80,000 of my own money and I had very limited support from AWS and there were people in AWS that helped me, but it came too late, it wasn't the right resources and even after I did it like it was just like, okay, what's the next thing we can get from Andrew? And it was just very frustrating. And so you know I go. I've been working with AWS for six years as a community member trying to build inroads and you know, I'm getting things from other companies that I'm surprised AWS doesn't provide and I'm not really making money and I produce a lot of AWS content. So what gives AWS? And that was kind of the feeling that I had when I made that post.

Speaker 2: 4:13

That's really. I mean, that's, that's really good, you know, and, and you know this pretty good thing we're talking about is is AWS. I mean I'm sure I can't, I can't say one way or the other if it's, you know, just AWS or other CSPs. But you, there's definitely a drive from the, I think from the CSPs, to kind of own and curate and and deliver their own training content, you know, so they can have full control over it. I'm sure it probably makes it easy from a, you know, a development perspective, like they have to develop the blueprint, they have to develop the exam, and so, you know also, of course it also helps unless not men's words here it also helps them own the, the messaging the, you know. So so if they're the ones making the he, you know the training content, there's not going to be anything in the training content that says, hey, by the way, you know, this breaks or this doesn't work or this isn't great, right, I definitely see that in a problem.

Speaker 3: 5:07

I would say that I think that, like all the CSPs, to a certain degree, want to own the full pipeline, but how they they go about that is completely different. Like, google's always been about having everything in their, in their ecosystem, and like, and not just not just certification content, but everything. And I always try to think of GCP as if you ever played the game Fallout, the new Fallout 4, and there's that, that organization that lives way under the ground and they're, they're like, they're the Institute to me, but I always think of them as the Institute. So I wouldn't necessarily say you know what they're doing is bad, but you know they're doing the way they want to do things and there's a reason why they're third, but you know they're doing what they want to do. Microsoft you know they push out content on Microsoft learn. We know they own LinkedIn, so they have LinkedIn learning. You know they, they have their fingers in GitHub, but you know there's still room for for creators like myself to interact there. And then you know AWS it's just, I don't know what's been going on, but they've been driving everything back to their platform. But you know, again, there's just, I feel like those other ones, they're trying to do the same thing, but there's still room for me to do things and so I'm less frustrated with them. But I would just say that I think that there is this a lack of of not understanding that the that this community community component, these other creators are the ones that are drivers, like you.

Speaker 3: 6:40

Look at the GitHub certifications that came out. Nobody was looking at those and they were. They were looking at like they're laughing at it because they had released four certs and they're all $200. And they just were not aligned whatsoever with what people wanted. Like the.

Speaker 3: 6:56

The GitHub foundation doesn't have any Git knowledge. Everybody wanted to get into the GitHub one because they thought there's, like there's going to be good Git knowledge in there. There wasn't, and so I had to go on on the internet and go, hey, this is a problem, nobody likes this and I had to. I consolidate a ton of the feedback that I was hearing from the community. But they did change and change and respond to it. But I'm just saying that had they not made those changes, I don't think they would have had the traction and it had, had it not been for user-generated content of myself and then the other creators that did it, you know we wouldn't have saw that drive for that interest, and I think that you know they kind of forget that there's that component to it. So I don't know. It's kind of my thoughts there.

Speaker 1: 7:35

Yeah, not to mention. I don't know if this kind of coincides with that or if this is something that that you guys have even noticed, but I I'm not going to name any names, but I'll say I have a lot of colleagues that I know that have eventually gone to AWS and then I feel like they they were people that were typically putting a lot of content out into the world and they kind of had to pull back and they were not producing as much. I don't know if that's because AWS told them not to, or kind of you know, push them away from that. But now it seems like in the last few months all those people are starting to come back and put out their own content. It's not directly tied to AWS, but they are putting out their own content at, but like it's obviously AWS focused, right. So are you seeing that as well? Do you think that is kind of some of the inner workings of this, or no?

Speaker 3: 8:23

What I'm seeing, like a few different things, is that there are people in AWS where, if they're in a particular role, they're under restrictions in terms of what they can publicly share, and so they might have sure into a role that allows them to have that flexibility to share the content they want to share. So they might have already wanted to do the great work, but they were not allowed to. Usually AWS employees are under. They have to get their speaker cert and other things before they publicly do things. I don't know if that's been relaxed or if we just have very specific employees that are now trying to build their own brand and you know, they're just going out there and doing their own thing. What I'm noticing is a lot more non developer advocates at AWS that are producing you know, I would call it there's no nice way to put it but just shallow, shallow content to drive up their own brand. Because maybe I like, I don't know what's going in their heads, but maybe they're thinking about what they're going to do after AWS, and we've seen that a lot with select AWS employees, where they're there for a year or two, then they left and then they leverage their ex AWS brand to build out their reputation, credibility, to then drive, drive themselves as a content creator. And I get that. I understand that, you know. But you know my frustration is just the quality content, especially its round certifications, because they're just driving this, this thing, telling everybody to do it, and it's not actually helping people, right. And then, even still, they won't even drive them into free content like mine, so that they can at least mitigate the cost. And it's not about sharing just my stuff, it was like nobody's other stuff, and so that's where I have an issue with it. I love the DAs that are to us, like 99% of them, because they act in a very responsible way. They're community first. They do have their own brand, but I think that they understand what's important.

Speaker 3: 10:14

And then we have these other rogue AWS employees that are just making me angry. There's an AWS employee that I think they're on the DevRel team and they used to share I would say borderline exam dump websites because they just didn't know what they were doing and they're just trying to share. They're like, oh, this place is part of the APN network. I'm like that doesn't matter, it's so easy to be part of the APN. I was telling them these practice exams. They look like mine or others that I've seen and you shouldn't be sharing them, and then they get mad at me. But now they're like a large influencer on Instagram and they're like top 50, under 50 or whatever. Do you know what I mean? But I remember this kind of stuff and other content creators remember this stuff, and we don't like it and we call it cloud grifting, which is this idea that whatever they tell them to their cells that they have to, it doesn't matter what they do, as long as they can get there, if that makes sense.

Speaker 4: 11:13

Yeah, and it's not even. It just feels like, especially around this last reinvent, something that I noticed it's kind of in lines with this is all the messaging, not just from people at the conference but outside of it, everyone that I follow that works for any of these big CSPs. They were sharing all of the AWS specific trainings, like you said. It's like all these new skill badges. I have seen so much stuff with all these skill badges and pointing to skill builder and all these very specific things that only they're creating and I just I don't ever see, like you said, I don't ever see them advertising anyone else that creates content.

Speaker 3: 11:49

And when skill builder came out like I was ready to just give them content like free content, and I thought it was a great idea that we could pull in the community and crowdsource content from both AWS and everybody. But that was closed doors and they had particular intentions for it. We don't know the drivers behind it, like whose boss's boss decides what they're doing. I'm not saying it's malicious, but I'm just saying that I think it's bad for the community. I don't know if they're internally told that they're supposed to share it or if it's just. You know, people are sharing it because they don't have their own content and they're just driving content that they know that AWS will like and allows them to build their own brand. Yeah, I'm not sure what it is, but it is very frustrating.

Speaker 2: 12:30

Oh man, yeah, you're hitting on so many things here, like as somebody who makes content. You know, I have to like pull myself back from jumping right along with you, because we could spend an hour just on this commiseration, and we should later after the show perhaps, but you're absolutely right. So when, so, I used to work at Cisco and I was helping with, I would do a lot of help with the exams there, exam creation and stuff, and you know, a lot of people don't know about this, about, but like learning at Cisco is. They're like I was sort of looking for it. They're considered to be revenue generating, like they're actually supposed to make money for Cisco, right, a lot of people don't know that, right, they think it's an enablement, yeah. So the point I'm making, though, is that, because of that, there's a lot of pressure internally to drive to the official stuff and to push it.

Speaker 2: 13:35

So the reason I mentioned that is not anything to do with Cisco, right, but I kind of wonder, you know, does AWS or the other CSPs have kind of a similar setup, where they're kind of being driven to actually turn a profit with their certification systems?

Speaker 2: 13:49

And this is not an excuse, this is not a free pass or an excuse for any of them, right? But because, at the end of the day, you know things like the AWS Community Builders Program and you know the Azure version, gcp version, whatever you know, they're all community driven. It's basically free advertising for AWS, right? The community, all the community builder type programs for all the CSPs are free advertising for them and getting the community involved is a huge, huge deal. So it's, I guess, the long story short is that I think that they need to do a better job balancing. You know the exactly I mean all of us on this call, I think, are community builders. Right, they need to do a better job balancing. You know the pressures of maybe having to turn a profit on their certification program with the supporting of, essentially, people who are giving them essentially free advertising, free content, like you mentioned, andrew.

Speaker 3: 14:43

So Well, and you know, we don't know if what they're doing is revenue generating or not. Like, what are the drivers? And it's been asked by a lot of folks. Just even this week, aws heroes were like what's the drivers? Why are they doing this and for what purpose? And we don't know.

Speaker 3: 15:00

But yeah, I would just say that, you know, out of every other company, the only one I've never been able to talk to directly is training certifications that are, to us, not allowed to talk to them. They don't want to talk to me and it's been like six years and I'm just kind of like, ooh, I've done there. You know there's other again I just do feel that, for whatever reason I don't know if it's because it's all of, because of all the overturned, because of the layoffs or things like that, but I'm just seeing or maybe because our industry is becoming more mainstream and because, you know, the food crisis and the housing crisis and everything's becoming so hard that everyone's desperate to get into tech. But you know, I do feel that we are getting a lot more folks out here that are trying to be the person selling the shovels and you know, we identified eight of us employees as doing that, but I do feel that we have more community members that are doing that and you know I always look at new con-creators not really understanding the space and I usually don't whack them over the head if they're, unless they are very consistently doing something that is not looking very honest for the community.

Speaker 3: 16:03

But you know, there was that book that came out recently and I was just like I don't mind that we had a bunch of people that came together to create a book and to share their backgrounds, but it frustrates me when it says cloud career journeys but it's all eight of us employees, like why not just call it eight of us, eight of us employees? And why does it have to be backed by, like four large companies that teach certification content and that's fine, like if they want to partner with them? I don't understand why it had to be integral into the book. My concern is more like I fundamentally think that there is a serious issue with certification content in its current state. Certification content it's either it does not produce the result that, like what's the certification it's supposed to certify that you can do the thing that you can do?

Speaker 3: 16:53

But, if nobody is hiring based on that, then the certification does not serve its purpose, and so, to me, certifications in the current state are fundamentally flawed because the people that are creating it are not creating those mechanisms around it to make it valuable. It's, it's. It is responsive to AWS, azure, gcp they're the ones that are making them. So I can't set the bars. They have to set the bars. But you know, it's like these certs either have to go away, they have to mean something, and so that means it requires an adjustment, or we need to find, like, some kind of middle ground or alternate path. Or, sorry, they should just be honest about what they actually effectively can do and put disclaimers on it, because if it all it is, it's just like.

Speaker 3: 17:37

I always say this all the time if you want to take certifications and you just want to have a goalpost and you just want to have a roadmap, that that that's what you want to use, you can use that.

Speaker 3: 17:45

But let's talk about those deficits and understand that, like these things are written as if, like product marketers, like let's teach you about every little feature of a product, and that nobody nobody hiring really cares about that level of knowledge they really want to have all those in between skills and troubleshooting skills, plus, plus, whatever that is, and these sorts are never going to validate or deliver on that and that's kind of my frustration there.

Speaker 3: 18:11

But that ties back to why it was saying like when I see clock clear journeys, they're saying the only like here's all of our stories and the best way to get in there is certifications. And that just kind of gets me angry at I make certifications, you know what I mean. Like that's how I make money. And it makes me mad to think like that's the messaging that we're sending out on broadcast, like on broadcast, and if I hadn't seen that they put it on a jumbotron in New York, I wouldn't have said anything. But as soon as you get to that level of broadcasting that stuff, then I'm going. Well, I'm going to say something and some people don't like me for it, but whatever.

Speaker 1: 18:46

Yeah, I mean, I think I think we've probably all had those several individuals that we've come across with in our, in our IT career paths that are some of the smartest people you've ever met and you're like genuinely amazed by the level of knowledge they have in their mind and they don't have one certification, like not a single one.

Speaker 1: 19:05

And so I think it's like I like your, I like your emphasis on the fundamentals and I think the difficult part is just how to? How to you know test for that or you know, if it's its certification, obviously it's testing for that or how to actually analyze and judge people based on the merits that they have, I guess, in that regard. But I wanted to touch on one thing that you mentioned before about, specifically, aws and their relationship with the content creators, because obviously they they have to be very aware that there are other people out there creating content that make a living on creating content based on helping people use their services right. And I'm curious to get your opinion on the recent announcement where they just like got rid of five certs, or what was it.

Speaker 1: 19:55

Yeah, four or five certs and it seems like there was no notification to any, any individual content creators out there and it's. Does that just tie back to the lack of a true like learner partner network type thing, or already?

Speaker 3: 20:11

Oh, yeah for sure. So, like, I know about certifications that nobody knows about that are coming out in the next six, nine months with other providers I'm not part of the community programs but I'm indirectly partnered and so I know that they're coming out because they know that I'm going to be a driver for these certifications when they come out. Aws we used to kind of get a blog post and kind of get a heads up and this just really caught everybody off guard. We were not expecting this stuff to happen. I think it was Adrian who is a fellow contractor.

Speaker 2: 20:38

That was that.

Speaker 3: 20:39

That was the one that was really upset about. I wasn't so upset about it because I looked at those two data certifications and I and I knew that that stuff was going to be shifted over to the data engineer certification and so that stuff could be repackaged and I hadn't invested too much time into those certs. So you know, for me it wasn't a big deal. But the SAP one, I mean, I'm not surprised it went. But you know, at the same time it's like we're trying to again create all this content, to create drive behind it, and we can't even coordinate or plan things because things are not predictable. And that's not to say that other ones have not been predict. Predictable. So, like Oracle in the past has, like, they released their certs and they changed it like three times over in the span of two and a half years and then like the shortest, the shortest renewal times, that made no sense. But you know it made sense for where they were in terms of their size and maturity, providing that educational material.

Speaker 3: 21:35

And as a cloud provider, google has caught me off guard a couple of times where they reworked their certifications like in less than seven months and I wasn't able to reset the exam. So I was kind of mad because I'd made all this content and not because they changed it, because I couldn't even go and reset it to do a quick update. So that's why I always fail exams. I have to fail exams, otherwise I might have a situation where I can't sit them if they unexpectedly update them. But for AWS this was a really big surprise because they've always been really good, not necessarily internally, but externally, telling us when things change.

Speaker 2: 22:10

That's true, yeah, in terms of lifecycle and stuff. They've always put out announcements and stuff in the past. Very good yeah.

Speaker 3: 22:16

So Microsoft is like. I would say Microsoft is like they're always changing things. So I mean you're just kind of used to it Like they're always fiddling with things, but it's not like they'll completely change an exam. I mean, at one point they change from text like text specific search to role based search, but that was a long time ago and I would just say that every three, four months, every two months, I don't know, they'll keep tweaking their exam guide outline, but it's not so radical that it's going to throw everybody off course, except for when they rename Azure AD to Microsoft Auditor ID. No one like that.

Speaker 1: 22:56

People love that one.

Speaker 3: 22:58

Yeah, they love it.

Speaker 4: 23:01

Just to hit on that a little bit more. This reminds me now and, andrew, I know you're not from a networking background so I know you don't know a lot about the Cisco networking certifications but there's a guy named Wendell Odom that basically every single person knows because it's like the entry level networking stuff. He's got all kinds of material and has for many years.

Speaker 2: 23:21

He's got it on lock, yeah.

Speaker 4: 23:23

I remember I went to Cisco Live in 2019 and I met him and we were talking about 2019 was a big deal because Cisco changed basically every single cert, completely changed the blueprints for all of them. But I was talking to Wendell about this, they knew beforehand. So it just shows we come from a much different place where it's like Cisco is so involved with the community and the training partners. They do podcasts with them. There's another guy, david Bombal, who routinely comes out with interviews with Cisco way before anyone else knows things or they're announced exclusively with that. So it's weird they just don't have that community element there.

Speaker 3: 24:05

I mean, I guess the thing is at AWS each department can do whatever they want. I love the community team at AWS. I think they're really really good, but each department at AWS does whatever they want. So whoever's running the ship over there is that's how they want to run it right, and why that is, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 24:27

That's fair. There's a few other things I wanted to get to, because we can really chase this rabbit all the way back to us all and I want to try to stay a little bit on target. So, okay, so we talked about basically what and I have some thoughts about this too but we talked about this, about what should certs be, the way that people learn, and, of course, your answer is kind of a resounding no. Well, having said that, what is the goal, or what should be the goal, of cloud training? And you've already kind of covered about. I was going to ask as well, like kind of how we missed the mark or if we're missing the mark on it, but I think you kind of covered that part. So let's talk a little bit, let's switch it around and say, okay, so what should the goal of cloud training be?

Speaker 3: 25:12

So my process is to work backwards and say what do companies want? And so I've been talking to recruiters, companies that do staff augmentation, I've been talking to a director of engineering, ctos, and at the end of the day, it's yes, you do need to learn, let's say, snowflake, but you need to know how to implement it within an ecosystem in a like with a team, right. So you know, if you come in and you learn in isolate, in something in particular like Terraform, that's not going to matter. If you don't know how to use Terraform with GitOps and you don't have any programming chops and you've never used Jira before and you've never been in a stand-up before. And this is more of.

Speaker 3: 25:57

I think this is becoming a major issue more recently just because of the flood of people coming into tech and you know, not everybody's been around here for 15, 20 years. They weren't around when Git first came out and we were all learning at the same time and things like that, and so you know, maybe certifications were less of an issue back then, but now you know we need to bring forth these skills and we need to test people on these stuff. Microsoft used to actually have you go into machines and do stuff and they would actually have somebody watch you do it and it wasn't necessarily a fail or pass on if you absolutely got it right or wrong. It was like somebody was actually judging you and that was a real qualifier. And, yes, it wasn't role-based, it was like specific to whatever it was, whether it was like virtual desktops or whatever it was.

Speaker 3: 26:50

But you know, it was a much different experience in terms of evaluating the person and I think that the reason we've gotten away from that is just because it scales at cost, when everything's multiple choice and you can cram more about your product in there if you leave all the other stuff out. And other stuff is hard to evaluate and teach and everybody has their own thing. But I would just say that you know, and it's like it is in my boot camps, but I like if I'm going to do something, I'm going to try to do it the production way, you know, bringing Cody in or whatever. But yeah, I don't know, sorry, yep.

Speaker 2: 27:25

No, you had something great there and I think I was trying to think of how to say it. Now I think I got it based on what you so okay. So, first of all, let's not pretend that a certification program from a vendor is like at least 50 more, like 80% marketing. It's a marketing push from that vendor. That vendor wants you to understand their product, they want you to like their product, they want you to recommend their product, they want you to use their products, right? So one of the huge values that independent and this and I realized that a vendor that and you kind of got me now thinking about the whole why bring it all in house thing again One of the good things that an independent you know, developer of certification content or whatever like yourself does is two things.

Speaker 2: 28:11

One is exactly what you just said right, go find out, you know, beyond the product itself, how the product is being used in the real world. So, and then include that, like that's something a vendor is never going to do, right? The vendor is going to be focused on their own product, right? And then the second thing is like I just like lost my train of thought there for a second.

Speaker 3: 28:34

Well, let's just talk about those things, about what they use. But you know what? Sometimes AWS uses things that aren't their own products. So, for example, the AWS I think I still think it is the AWS website that you go to AWS Amazoncom isn't served by cloud front, it's served by Fastly. The reason it's served by Fastly is because Fastly is fast and they need it to bust the cash as fast as possible.

Speaker 3: 29:00

So they don't necessarily always use their internal products, for whatever reason. They don't talk about that in their certs. They don't even talk about the fact that they don't use it. Then there's like, if there's competing services, everybody uses Active Directory Not everybody, but a lot of organizations do Ensure. Aws has some kind of offering in there for their directory service, but they're never going to talk about what it really looks like. So that's where we're running into issues. That, I think, is something that independent creators can do, because we're not drinking the Kool-Aid. We can say whatever we want, to a certain degree, if, depending on what kind of relationship we want to have with these providers.

Speaker 2: 29:42

Yeah, real quick, I just remember. The second thing was the other thing is because you can do this whole ecosystem thing that vendors can't do. You can bring a level of value to someone taking your content or your content or just any third-party developers' content that they can't get from that vendor's official content, which is that other look at their product in context, I guess. Sorry, it took me forever to actually remember that.

Speaker 3: 30:17

And the thing is I can go, and when I'm talking about Azure and let's say I'm really good at AWS I can be like, hey, I'm a developer, I have my developer hat on and I'm used to AWS I can go in here and go yeah, I'm using Azure and I'm finding that storage accounts is like an umbrella service and it's completely laid out differently.

Speaker 3: 30:36

But here's how I'm going to help you bridge your knowledge from AWS to Azure and I can comparatively talk about them. Google kind of tried to do this. They would have kind of like, if you're coming from AWS over to Google or Azure over to Google, but they still couldn't directly talk and compare the services. So they would just say, like I am is where you manage your identities, and they say, over here, we do it in here, but they couldn't put them side by side and compare them. And I think that's extremely valuable if you want to get people to move into your cloud or stuff like that. And so Google could use me, as they say well, we're not allowed to say it, but you can say it and they could. I'm not saying they're encouraging me, but they could encourage me to do that, because I'm a proxy to do that, and that's actually how these companies should use us and work with us, but they don't necessarily do that.

Speaker 1: 31:32

And there's. I think the CSPs have kind of started to show at least some inference or some at least some acknowledgement that multi cloud is definitely a thing now like participating in multi cloud environments.

Speaker 1: 31:45

So, if anything, if independent creators are going to take that burden to create all those inter interdependencies in their content, say like, oh well, you know, I'm maybe making a course that teaches you how to use code pipeline, but I also am going to include, you know, all these get fundamentals, you see, icd fundamentals. Like if you're going to create all that and you're going to own that they should, how does that look bad for them? Like they should be getting, they should be like helping you hand over fist. I feel like, because that is, that is the gap that they are they aren't addressing right, because they can't and they don't want to spend the money to. You know, get in bed with you know, whoever, whoever that may be cooperating that right?

Speaker 3: 32:26

Well, and remember, you know, there were, there was things like a cloud guru in Linux Academy and they were big juggernauts because there was such a huge gap in that market that I don't know what their relationships with AWS, Azure and GCP were. But I heard stories and you know, I think that they want to, they don't want to have to deal with a big juggernaut, but I'm just going to tell you like it's not like that anymore. We have a more diverse crowd of content creators and you know, I do feel that these teams can work with us. But yeah, for whatever reason whether it's legal, whether it's just somebody on the sitting on top of a high chair just doesn't want to, doesn't want to do it so yeah, it's, it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 33:08

Yeah, like that. I like that you say they're sitting in a high chair.

Speaker 2: 33:11

Yeah, that's probably what it is Throwing their food on the floor. I mean, I was thinking.

Speaker 3: 33:17

I was thinking more, like you know, like those kitchen chairs. I don't know very tall kitchen chair, but yeah if you want to picture them as a baby, as a baby just throwing stuff, that's fine too. I'm sure they're going to want to work with me after this, Right?

Speaker 2: 33:35

It's hard.

Speaker 3: 33:36

It's hard, like, again, there are companies out here again that I'm able to work with and I respect them and they don't always do the things that I think are best, but they go. But I at least, I know they go. Yeah, there's reasons for it and they don't always make sense and just understand that this is what we're working with and I go okay, that's fine. Do you know what I mean? Like, I get it and they're doing the best that they can do under their circumstances. But you know, when you have no communication, then it's a different story and I don't feel bad.

Speaker 3: 34:02

And you know, as soon as they start talking to me, my, my, my tune will change because I'll go okay, we're working together, we're going to better direction, but until then I don't care. And right now it's, you know, like saying this stuff could cause a lot of people stress, because people are getting overturned and, like I already know, like these people are hearing me, even if they're not talking to me. So I don't tell you it'd be it's easier to talk to me in private than it is for me to talk out loud by myself, you know. So it's their choice.

Speaker 2: 34:35

Yeah, totally agreed on that one. All right. So we touched on this a little bit. I wanted to ask this, or talk about this a little bit.

Speaker 2: 34:46

Certifications used to be so when certifications were first introduced, like just go back to like the first certifications, if you will, or specifically even the first tech certifications.

Speaker 2: 34:55

Certifications used to be a way to validate knowledge that you already had right, like, so, certification. The value of a certification was that someone who was certified had, you know, already had years of experience, and because of that they were able to take this certification, pass it, and so you could believe, by proxy trusts you know, of this, of this vendor or of this organization that this person was accomplished and able to perform whatever tasks that they're certified to do. Right, when it became I say when it became, but I don't know if this is when it happened or you know, obviously, what the impetus was but at some point it became more of a training program, like you will take this training and then you will get certified and then you will get the job, doing the thing right. So you know what's your, what's your thoughts about, I guess, that shift, or do you think it's a good thing? Do you think it is. I get the feeling you probably don't think it's a good thing is what you said before.

Speaker 3: 35:59

Because it just, it creates it just it's like printing money, because the idea is that people are going to go through it and no matter what, whether they're good or bad, they have, they have the means to get through. And I mean mostly. Again, it comes back to how they are doing the validation, which is multiple choice. Multiple choice is not necessarily bad, but the way they're engineered it's. It's like identify and think and whatever.

Speaker 3: 36:24

You know, my family business was computer repair and one way we could tell whether somebody was good or not to hire was if they had their A plus certification. And that was like there's people that had skills, that could do stuff, but if they had skills and they had their A plus, then we knew they had a good foundation to not only have the practical skills but be able to do a lot more, and so that had value, right. Whereas we have people coming in and they don't have any skills and then they're just engineered to pass this very specific thing which is all very product focused and doesn't have everything else in it, and so that's a problem.

Speaker 3: 37:00

Now, 2016, 2018, cloud certifications made sense because, at the time, a lot of companies did not understand how to move to the cloud. Just talking about going for your cloud certification was enough to get you a job. Or sorry, not get you a job, but get you a job interview.

Speaker 2: 37:18

Interview yeah.

Speaker 3: 37:20

Yeah, and I think that we're well beyond that point and things need to be a lot harder. Things need to be. We need to ask real people actually evaluating folks. But even if we did, we have an even bigger problem, which is I ran my boot camp and it was like six, seven months and I graded so many people manually and it was like what's the tough mutter or American ninja or whatever. Literally there was real failure and every week people were dropping out and so people that made it to the end legitimately could do the work and they came from nothing and they turned themselves into something.

Speaker 3: 38:05

But for the most part, it's like, even though I did that, these companies are going yeah, okay, but where's your three years experience? Right, and they're not budging on it, and it's like they're just comfortable with the way they have their mechanisms for validation. And it's so heartbreaking to see people transform and to become capable, skilled people that can do the work, and I will really want to connect them with those jobs, but I don't have the hiring partners and things like that and I'm going okay, well, even if certifications don't work and projects don't work, what do we do?

Speaker 2: 38:41

What do you do? How do you stop the chicken and egg problem of that?

Speaker 4: 38:46

And those same people that are so strict about those three requirements are the ones saying about all the skills gap that we have, and it's like this could solve so many of those issues.

Speaker 2: 38:59

I can't find anybody to hire, but I suppose it's probably because you're not hiring anybody who doesn't have five to 10 years in this thing. Those people already have jobs probably.

Speaker 1: 39:11

You gotta ride on the bike with the stick just sticking it in there.

Speaker 3: 39:14

There's other mechanisms. I think that they not just experience, but some that they might use If their hiring managers are originally from in Canada, like University of Waterloo I'll use an example, because a lot of hiring managers are from there and a lot of companies in Toronto. They were alumni. So they'll bring in co-op students and they know exactly how to evaluate those students. Which is using this stuff, the cracking, the coding, interview, right, this stuff.

Speaker 3: 39:42

It doesn't matter what you do. You can be updating the WordPress site. If you're coming in for the interview, you're doing algorithms, and they were taught in school. They said if you can't reverse a binary tree or whatever it is like a sort of binary tree or whatever then you probably don't have good skills. And I mean, I get it, it works for them and they are excluding other folks, but they are getting what they want. But why can't Andrew Brown's boot camp be enough? And so it has to do with how you build out that network and stuff like that. So there has to be some way we can fix that, but I'm still trying to figure that out.

Speaker 4: 40:24

It's the leak code. Score right, you gotta figure out how to get your version.

Speaker 2: 40:30

I mean there's a trust thing there too, right? People trust a vendor, so they trust a vendor certification. I went through you know full disclosure, right. I went through Andrew's Terraform boot camp and I mean I knew Terraform pretty decently going into, but I actually didn't have nearly as much get experiences I thought I did, because he put it like I actually learned a shit ton about get.

Speaker 3: 40:55

Yeah, I didn't know, I was throwing people for a loop, I just like and so like. That was really interesting because I'm going to run a get boot camp, but I did not realize that there was so many people that have 15 years experience because they're not in the developer space.

Speaker 2: 41:07

That's it.

Speaker 3: 41:08

You know what I mean. It's not like, it's just you don't know, right, like you don't, you have no idea of that ecosystem.

Speaker 2: 41:12

I don't use it. Yeah, so it was awesome actually, all three of us, yeah.

Speaker 3: 41:15

But? But like get ops, speak for yourself. Get ops is just super useful for infrastructure and things like that. So there's definitely synergies. But, you know, or there's things like and I probably shouldn't have put it in the boot camp, but, like it was like the second week we did, we wrote our own Go Bank provider.

Speaker 2: 41:30

Yes, we did you know what?

Speaker 3: 41:31

I mean. So, like you know, people said like, hey, andrew, did you really have to put that in there? And I said, well, I don't know. I just kind of think that we need to really push people, like push people as hard as we can to not to break them, but like to get them uncomfortable and and even if they fail, like to get new exposure. Whereas certifications can't do that, yeah, no it was good yeah.

Speaker 1: 41:57

I remember I remember we were chatting with Chris Williams about that and he was just like, yeah, we got into this boot camp and we just started writing our own provider and Go, and I was like Jesus man, I was like I've never even considered doing that. But at the same time it made me realize, like on the back end, like I know at a very basic level how Terraform providers work right and what they're, what they're interacting with, but building one. I think that would actually be very beneficial for me to understand probably 10 things that I've experienced in Terraform in the last two weeks. I would probably understand a little bit better if I knew how the provider was built Right.

Speaker 3: 42:28

Well, and I think, like my goal wasn't to make you good at building providers, it was just more like I'm going to show you like let's open it up, let's look at the inside and hopefully something connects and you'll carry that forward. And that was, that was the real component of it, and for me, I think that's where value is created for folks, because if they don't understand the mechanism of the release, how are they going to build those troubleshooting skills Right? Otherwise, it's just like. It's just like a closed box. You don't know.

Speaker 2: 42:59

You know what I mean, yeah no, the context is what I appreciated about the whole bootcamp, like you. Like you had been saying the whole, you know this whole show that you've been doing right. You know just learning something in a vacuum, sure, multiple choice, right. Type of question, right, yeah, okay, that's fine. But you need to learn it like what you're actually going to be doing with it in the real world once you're done with it, and you're not only going to be using that product for your. You're always going to be part of an ecosystem. You're always going to be using it along that side of the thing. So you know, I thought it was hard as hell, but I appreciate it.

Speaker 3: 43:32

That was my beginner bootcamp.

Speaker 2: 43:33

That was the beginner bootcamp.

Speaker 3: 43:35

Yeah, I was like Adry, you can make it easier, I'll make more money. I'm like I know, but I just feel like I got a few things in here.

Speaker 2: 43:42

Oh my God. Yeah, you know hesitate to do a shill there, but like the quote unquote value is like off the charts.

Speaker 3: 43:50

Dude, it was nuts $50 or free you know like, and it just pains me when I see like people charging $1,000 to learn the cloud practitioner. It was nuts.

Speaker 3: 44:05

I had a Canadian company the other day and they're oh, I'm taking this thing and I'm paying. They're like paying $5,000 for $1,000 per each cert, and they go on. Yeah, so I think that I'm going to become a cloud architect. I feel I read all the job descriptions. I think cloud architect is for me and I'm targeting for September 2024. And they're like I'm just working on my cloud practitioner, just working on that one. I'm not from a tech background right. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 44:29

And I go and I have to say I'm like, just so you know, that's great ambition, but you know, you know, generally takes about three years, three years hard work, to possibly get your first role. And the role you're targeting is not an entry level role. And certifications are a possible path and that's great that you're doing them, but it's not the most optimal path and you got a lot of pain in front of you. But just in case they prove me wrong, I'm like you might be special, I don't know, but that's the thing. And they go okay.

Speaker 3: 45:03

Well, when's your next boot camp coming out? I need to add a project to my resume. I'm like, look, I just want you to know, I did a boot camp and you know, I feel that a lot of people got value out of the upskilled, but it didn't necessarily help them get a job. And if you have those certifications and project to show your experience, it'd be better if you were to go and try to get experience. Go to a nonprofit, go to any company, go find an accountant that needs a secure Dropbox, like a secure way of dropping files, like that's things.

Speaker 3: 45:34

Like my accountant asked me like hey, can you make? We're like no, I don't have time for that. And so you know like add real experience, because the only thing I hear from recruiters and companies and everyone's like we want to see real experience. We don't trust anything but real experience. We've seen too many projects, we've seen too many certifications, we've seen people with gold jackets and they can't do the work. We need better trust from these folks and they go. Okay, yeah, I hear you, but yeah, when's your next boot camp? I'll pay for it.

Speaker 1: 46:00

I'm like yeah maybe in March.

Speaker 3: 46:04

I got to feed my kids. You know, like, like.

Speaker 2: 46:06

Yep, I get it you don't know anything.

Speaker 2: 46:08

No, we did an episode last year about kind of the hopes and dreams being sold by some of this grift out here, selling these boot camps, selling these hopes and dreams to people that are just trying to make better life for themselves. So, yeah, we have lots of thoughts about that. Still irrelevant a year later. Yeah, and always will be relevant. Let's not joke ourselves, right. Yeah, so, yeah, we need to. All right, so we're just about out of time. Probably need to wrap it up. So let's see any final thoughts that you want to share, andrew.

Speaker 3: 46:41

Yeah, so I'll be running some cloud certification boot camps coming up here and if you're really looking to get those certifications, to get it on your resume, to get that job, look up for those boot camps. But yeah, I would just say that you know, if you want to do certifications, I'm not going to stop you. Everybody wants to do them. I'm going to do the best to provide them at the lowest to zero cost. If you got to pay, at least give me the money so that I can make content that is going to be beyond certifications, because that's what I would really love to do, you know. But you know some people. They have to go through it to find out.

Speaker 3: 47:17

And if you do waste a bunch of money and you still need a free resource, I'll be there and you know, I just hope people can make that transition and make that change that they really want in their lives and hopefully it helps them and I would like it if they like tech too. You know what I mean. Yes, money is great, I get it, but you know it's going to help you, if you like it, long term, because you know it's not a one and done thing. You know it's a lot of work. You know it's so much work to Treadmill forever, treadmill forever.

Speaker 4: 47:43

Yeah, yeah, no lie.

Speaker 3: 47:45

It's a lifestyle. You know, If you don't like it, if you take it one of my boot camps, you don't like it, then go take a trades.

Speaker 2: 47:53

All right, that's awesome, chris.

Speaker 1: 47:56

No, all good. Yeah, I think that's great messaging. Yeah, the one. I'm excited to see what feedback we get from this episode. How are you feeling about certifications? Let us know. Let Andrew know as well. I'm sure he'll have a chat about it. But yeah, dude, thanks for coming on. I think this has been great. Yeah, alex, bring us home.

Speaker 4: 48:15

Yeah, I don't have any questions that aren't going to result in like another 30 minutes, so I'm going to All right, I'll leave it be. I think we covered a lot of good things. So, yeah, thanks for coming on, andrew. This is great.

Speaker 2: 48:30

Yeah, I definitely think we could have kept going and there's a lot more meat on the bone to talk about, so we'll have to have Andrew back soon. Thanks again for coming on, andrew, and spending your time with us tonight. Appreciate it For all the listeners. If you like what you heard, please if you haven't already, please subscribe to us on your favorite pod catcher, like our YouTube channel. Buy Our Board Game. It's out by Milton Bradley Next. Not bad, yeah and yeah. So we'll see you on the next episode of Cables to Clouds. Hi everyone, I'm Tim and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite podcast catcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all the show notes at CablesToCloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.