Developer Discovers AI Career Tool Rewarded Certificates Over Real Skills

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A developer building VentureTwin AI, a career guidance platform for students, found that a student with 20+ online certifications consistently outscored a peer with stronger hands-on experience including full-stack apps, open-source contributions, and hackathon participation. After ruling out bugs by tracing every stage of the pipeline and verifying database records, the developer identified the root cause as a feature engineering flaw: certification counts produced larger raw numbers that dominated the fixed-weight scoring model. The issue was not a coding error but a comparability problem, as features from different modules were operating on incompatible scales. To fix this, the developer normalized all features and replaced the fixed-weight system with a weighted scoring strategy that better reflected practical engineering ability.

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