I'm going to try and narrate my experience trying to complete the OCI certifications, that I signed up for because of peer pressure. If you are here from the future, China does China eating raw animals and shit, COVID-19 outbreak starts in Wuhan ~ Dec 2019 and is declared a pandemic by March 2020. Countries all over are forced to shut shop and kind of sleep with an empty stomach. Tourism, Aviation, Manufacturing, Automobiles, and their dependant services are worst hit; which includes the IT department from both product and service companies; pink slips starts to shower all over! And everyone is trying to differentiate themselves among thousands in the candidate pool, LinkedIn articles and learning badges becomes the norm.
It seems Oracle saw an opportunity to make their new cloud offering familiar with IT community, and they announced that "5 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure certifications are free till May 15, 2020", later extends the program by adding 1 more certification to the list. Out of them, 4 are associate, one is professional and one is specialist level certification. Cloud scene is dominated by AWS & Azure; OCI doesn't even have considerable shares like Alibaba, GCP, or IBM and so I saw no point in spending my time here. [I might be wrong, this site ranks Oracle cloud at 6, https://cloudwars.co/cloud-wars-top-10-vendors-world; but this website is publishing too many pro-OCI posts - so take this with a grain of salt]
Nany in my team saw this as a golden opportunity, not just because it is free, more importantly, we wanted to move our applications to the cloud and our applications are tightly coupled to Oracle database (RAC). Motivated by oracle guru of our team, many took the certifications seriously and started to boast about it in daily calls. I was at best, appreciative towards their effort but for the most part, I remained indifferent because I still don't see value in it.
Somewhere around May 13th I let the peer pressure get the better of me 😏 and I tried to complete the very basic one - OCI Foundation but I later realised I cannot schedule the exam within May 15th since all available openings are taken. Later my lead informed the team that it is not necessary to complete the certification before May 15th, but only that registration and scheduling needs to happen before that and available dates in future months can be picked. Oddly enough I got excited, way too excited and registered for 4 certifications except for foundation and Autonomous DB since I'm not any kind of specialist in DB.
With my first exam falling on July 28th, I had more than ample time to prepare for the exams and so I procrastinated and eventually forgot I had to prepare! "The overconfident dumb-ass", i.e. I scheduled three exams back to back in 2 days; I did such stunt in hope that I can translate my knowledge in AWS to OCI. 1st on July 28 - Architect associate, 2nd & 3rd on July 28 -9:45 pm & 11:45 pm slots - Developer & Operations; if you are wondering, yes I sabotaged my own exam even before appearing, I got greedy and in rush booked exams in back to back slots of the same day! by the time I realised the mistake, there wasn't slot left to correct (I was not allowed to postpone). Thankfully, I scheduled the 4th exam on August 12th - Architect Professional, but I have to clear the first exam on July 28th to be able to appear for the last exam (or so I thought, it seems it is not necessary, since I don't see associate certification as a prerequisite for professional certification).
And July came, I promised I'll go through the material comfortably in a slow pace, 1 week for every exam and then 1 week for hands-on experience for everything - because you design (architect), develop, deploy for all-round experience, did it in AWS, Azure, GCP now one more provider - no big deal. But then 3 weeks of the heavy lifting in office put a damper in my plans, all 3 weeks went without watching one clip of OCI video material! Then I choose to get serious, if not for bragging rights I decided I was not going to be the "left-behind", took 3 days off from office and prepared, honestly the questions were not tough, for the first 3 exams I had zero exposure to OCI only theoretical knowledge from the video (at 1.5x ~ 2x speed).
Yes, I took 3 days off, but still, I was not able to take the certification seriously so I sort of drifted on and off; this lead to me preparing till last moment. Naturally, my mind collapsed on a packed day 2, I tried to keep my mind alive by reading the questions aloud but the proctor warned that, if I read the question aloud one more time I'll be forfeited and also my webcam died on my 9:45 slot exam and so they rebooted the exam and I got scared and lost my composure; I was in worst possible shape physically and mentally for 11:45 pm, even more scared, paranoiac, exhausted and sort of threw the operations exam - I didn't review one question; I feel awful now. But Shiva, what about the sleep schedule you promised? won't this kind of compressed learning affect sleep? yes, yes it does, it is messed up man!
Round 1: Results - Trying to clear two exams that require a serious amount of context switch is no easy task, but I thought I'll be able to pull-it-off; my bragging would have been through the roof had I done it 😏 Thankfully I cleared Architect Associate exam without trouble 😊, so no problem in taking up the professional exam. I lost both Developer and Operations certification by 10 points 😟 and it kept me humble.
Round 2: The August - Architect professional certification. I was going to be well prepared, 2 weeks:- 1 week for videos, 1 week for hands-on and by newton's first law I didn't touch one video till I received remainder mail from Pearson (4-days before the exam). First, 3 exams had 10 hours of videos and this one had almost 17 hours of video, phew, but thankfully they were repetitive content from first 3 courses and I zoomed through at 2x pace occasionally pausing to take notes; I particularly never slowed down for database sections (over 3 hours - 20% of the whole course), Mr Bal Sharma's heavy north Indian accent could also be the reason I almost skipped DB part, we may never know. All the videos except for operations were handled by Indians; makes me feel strange and proud. I particularly enjoyed Rohit Rahi's course of Architect associate - calm, accent free, understandable probably that is why I cleared it in the first place.
The day of the exam, I was nervous but no hurry bury, I was better prepared with mock exams and stuff. For the first exam, my broadband died on me and so I had to go to a neighbours home, and they kept talking to me, and one proctor closed my exam, thankfully I tipped and sort of convinced them not to talk to me for next 1 hour. For the next 3 exams, I made sure no family members will use wifi and so the internet was stable and I was able to take the exam from my desk; I didn't clear the first 2 exams that I took from home, I thought my home is jinxed, turns out low preparation and high stress is the cause. Now I know it for sure because I cleared the 3rd exam I took from home (overall 4th if you are keeping count), and now I'm Oracle certified OCI Architect Professional!
There is a high possibility for people like me to develop Impostor syndrome because without rigorous hands-on knowledge about the platform one might get certified. And I have the solution for you - https://go.oracle.com/hols | The page contains Self-Guided Labs: Get Hands-on Experience Developing in the Oracle Cloud that will quickly get you familiar with the platform and impart knowledge that can be used in real-world scenarios.
Am I proud of my achievement and bragging rights that I unlocked? yes of course! will they be useful in a real-life scenario? only the future can tell. To be frank, I hate Oracle for messing with open source projects I loved like Open office and Hudson, but now all the 3 certifications I hold are from Oracle and it is the last cloud I trained by hands-on, but I know most about them now! Honestly, they quickly covered bases by offering free certification, it might seem that they have sort of devalued certification but offering it in mass (demand-supply principle); but think again, if companies like us who are still evaluating cloud providers have better knowledge and even certified employees when it comes to OCI it is a win for Oracle, isn't it?
So, I was talking about my team, the peers who pushed me to take this certification. The team is filled with decision-makers and enablers lead by group CTO, we are the IT Architecture team. I cannot stress this enough, we are still deciding the cloud vendor we want to use; our primary constraint is offering Oracle DB on the cloud. Now everyone in my team has at least one OCI certification and we discuss OCI blogs almost daily now, like, "will they have a region up in Europe?", "will it be 3 AD or 1 AD?" and so on; I concede Oracle did win by providing free certification to masses. As an organisation, I think we are too dependant on Oracle - middleware, service bus, database, Oracle JDKs; dependant to a repulsive extend, OCI might be a step too much, but if it reduces the overall bill, we might end up marrying Oracle forever.
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