It depends on where you are in your career and what you’re doing. A lot of devs don’t need them for early career or at small companies, but if you want to get out of a pigeonhole and switch it up then they can help make that happen. And at large companies, they’re very quantitative when it comes to performance reviews and can give you a bit of shielding from moody reviewers’ feelings.

If you’re finding yourself more in an architecture role, they help buy a little cred with the infra crew since they really like their certs. And if you’re approaching a consulting principal type of role, they can serve as kind of a lingua franca for people who know little about you but are considering trusting you with their business.

It helped me. I jumped into AWS positions without any certifications. I was fine as long as I stuck what I needed to do. However, every time I had to work around a limitation of the architecture or come up with a strategy, it felt difficult as I had no context outside of the few services I touched. So I did the solution architecture cert and then the dev associate to understand how things are being planned in my project and plan and strategize better.