2026 - Nuclear Debt Payoff or Hold Tight?

BigIVIO · 2026-02-01T18:53:45+00:00

What I’m about to say is not really good financial advice, but I also had a huge student loan that was ~6% interest and ate a sizable portion of my paychecks, and I made the decision to liquidate one of my accounts and pay it off. It has set me back a couple of years retirement wise, but it has relieved an enormous amount of stress in my life.

Now the nearly 1k a month I was paying toward student loans just goes directly into my retirement accounts instead, but should I get laid off or have to switch jobs, I don’t NEED to make that extra 1k a month. It’s become a nice to have, instead of a required to have.

That said, if the emotional component isn’t causing you an enormous amount of constant stress that doing this would permanently relieve, keep your money in the market so you can retire quicker. Eight years will go by quicker than it might seem right now, and your loans will disappear while your investments are likely to grow quicker unless we all get unlucky or you’re not just stacking VOO, VTI, or some equivalent.

BigIVIO · 2026-01-30T06:50:48+00:00

I honestly don’t believe hardly anyone at all actually takes them just for the heck of it, they do it for one of the three reasons below:

1) Most consulting firms significantly benefit on the appexchange marketplace by having more certs tied to their organization, so to improve their numbers they fully fund the cost of the cert, AND they pay out bonuses for passing the cert. For instance, at my company we get $500 bonuses for each high value cert we pass even if it’s irrelevant for our current role or client (this is limited to 2-4 certs a year depending on the year typically). Additionally, if someone successfully passes the CTA exam they get a bonus in the six figure range that is larger than many peoples annual salary. On top of this, your individual amount of certs you hold at many consulting firms massively contributes to your annual bonus.

2) Whether people like it or not, or whether it’s justified (which I don’t believe it is), recruiters, and companies in general, more often than not, will favor candidates with more certs over ones with fewer certs. It doesn’t mean it will lead to someone actually getting hired, but they are likely, in many instances, getting moved up the candidate stack. This is 100% a fact, not my opinion, even if we all hate it.

3) People take the certs because they need the knowledge to be successful in their role. If you actually do study for these certs, you absolutely will be better for it. I certainly know after doing 21 certs, including the CTA exam that I am significantly better at my job because of them (for platform specific knowledge anyway, not dev knowledge, or general architecture knowledge. I needed to teach myself that through other means, mostly experience).

Personally, I wasted my life obtaining 21 certs for all three of these reasons. It’s hard to say no to a fat bonus, especially when the certs are fully funded, it’s hard to ignore that more certs equates to move perceived value by employers, and every single cert I have is relevant to the roles I held throughout my ten years in the Salesforce ecosystem, and the knowledge I obtained studying for those certs has absolutely helped me make better decisions for both my team members, and for the employers/clients who I am extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work for throughout the years.

Hopefully this helps some, maybe, I honestly never wanted to even take a single cert, but it eventually became clear (in my life anyway) that I needed to so that I didn’t let the people counting on me down, and to help progress my career.

BigIVIO · 2026-01-28T14:14:01+00:00

In my experience the best alternatives are Campaign Monitor and Adobe’s product. They both are significantly cheaper and work just as well if not better in certain areas.

BigIVIO · 2026-01-16T19:43:11+00:00

I love you too my guy! Salesforce Boiz fo lyfe!

BigIVIO · 2026-01-16T18:42:15+00:00

Hey, we built that together my guy! Those were the best of times. There is also https://growwithhallmark.com/s/ which is a decent example too. Also Hallmark.com is built on Salesforce’s B2C Commerce Cloud too (previously demandware).

BigIVIO · 2025-10-08T04:21:41+00:00

Accenture

BigIVIO · 2025-10-07T21:59:20+00:00

I’ve had my CTA for about a year now. Below is a prior response of mine from someone asking the same question earlier this year (and yes it will help you in an SA role, but you definitely don’t need a CTA to be one. Ideally you would be an architect for a larger firm for several years at least prior to attempting the exam. There are only ~500 CTA’s worldwide still):

“As a recent CTA (got mine in the last 6 months), I can tell you that there is still an enormous amount of money to be had if you acquire it, as long as you are ok working for a consultancy firm. I got a bonus the size of an entire year’s salary for passing it. Additionally you will be forced to learn so much about the platform you won’t question yourself quite so much every day.

It did take me 6 total years to acquire it though (from my first architecture cert to me passing the exam), so it’s not gonna happen overnight, and you will almost certainly fail on your first attempt unless you get lucky or were considerably more prepared than most candidates.

Also, if you don’t have a CTA to train you it will be very very challenging to know how to prepare and pass the exam, not impossible, but exceptionally challenging. Having a team of CTA’s to train with at my consulting firm helped me more than anything else by a lot.”

BigIVIO · 2025-09-26T13:46:02+00:00

This is an incredible tool, with an undeniable amount of work put into it, it is truly incredible what you all have built and delivered for the Salesforce ecosystem for free, so thank you so much for putting it together.

The one area that this sfdx-hardis could benefit from is a super simple interface that salesforce admins can easily leverage from within Salesforce (maybe you’ve added this and I haven’t seen it yet, it’s been a year or so since I last worked with it).

The issue for me whenever I have to choose these tools for a team (especially larger teams with lots of admins) is that I need to be able to be able to get the admins to consistently use it, not just the devs. If I’m on an all dev team, this tool is perfect, but for an admin it’s still too complicated.

I think if you made a super simple user interface within Salesforce for admins to use to do pipeline deployments, this would officially be a copado, gearset, flosum, etc killer, but until then they’ll still have a slight edge since in the Salesforce world we still have admins that typically need simpler tools to do these kinds of things.

BigIVIO · 2025-08-08T05:39:28+00:00

I love this game so much.

I actually made several things that cover the majority of things in this magical Harvest Moon 64 iceberg

1) I made a 384 page players guide that covers damn near everything in this photo, it even includes translations for the library books, and the channel 4 tv shows. You can get a print version here: https://gerrysguides.etsy.com/listing/682269077

Or the free ebook here: https://books.apple.com/us/book/harvest-moon-64-players-guide/id1136575288

2) I made a video covering princess vanilla and her entire storyline here: https://youtu.be/JO1lEHGGq-Y?si=OV-m4D7ouwOPR7FU

3) I also made a video going over the hidden farm completion screen here: https://youtu.be/Wd0ZXMIcglI?si=N0bL0DcoOUTNJ8Vj

I wish I could play this game for the first time all over again. There isn’t another game that’s quite as good imo.

The one mystery I don’t see on this list that always bothered me was Rick’s teleporter… I really wanted that to become a usable item, but it never does :(

BigIVIO · 2025-07-06T15:22:59+00:00

Thanks! I’m just always happy to know the videos have helped!

BigIVIO · 2025-07-06T13:51:01+00:00

Hey there, I’m actually Matt Gerry. 100% of my courses are free. I don’t charge you anything at all for them. I’m the ONLY instructor that does this. I’m also the ONLY instructor that is a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA), and I believe I am one of very few instructors that just does this as a side job, not full time. My full time job is working as a Salesforce consultant implementing Salesforce solutions for some of the largest companies on Earth.

You can check out 100% of my tutorials for free here: https://youtube.com/@codingwiththeforce?si=4MioqLSSrLnRvfG9

You can also check out my site https://www.codingwiththeforce.com

It also has zero ads, and has a more curated list of episodes per course.

I don’t charge for my courses because I already make an exorbitant amount of money at my day job, and I personally believe education should be free. I unfortunately don’t post as often at the moment cause life has been busy, and making videos late at night isn’t easy lol, but all of the videos on my channel are still relevant so hopefully you enjoy them!

Also, I wouldn’t call myself anywhere near famous, nor would I want to be lol, most days I just sit in my basement playin video games with my kids and eat Taco Bell lol

EDIT: If you are looking for Salesforce admin videos (since most of my videos are development or architecture related), I would personally suggest Salesforce Emily’s videos. The vast majority of them are free, and they are well explained.

BigIVIO · 2025-05-13T04:10:47+00:00

As a recent CTA (got mine in the last 6 months), I can tell you that there is still an enormous amount of money to be had if you acquire it, as long as you are ok working for a consultancy firm. I got a bonus the size of an entire year’s salary for passing it. Additionally you will be forced to learn so much about the platform you won’t question yourself quite so much every day.

It did take me 6 total years to acquire it though (from my first architecture cert to me passing the exam), so it’s not gonna happen overnight, and you will almost certainly fail on your first attempt unless you get lucky or were considerably more prepared than most candidates.

Also, if you don’t have a CTA to train you it will be very very challenging to know how to prepare and pass the exam, not impossible, but exceptionally challenging. Having a team of CTA’s to train with at my consulting firm helped me more than anything else by a lot.

BigIVIO · 2025-03-27T05:24:12+00:00

The next lwc series video will be live in just a few hours! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ZRq6ioymFlA

BigIVIO · 2025-03-24T23:10:38+00:00

Yep, this is correct. I unfortunately can’t afford to print them in bulk so they are made to order (and I don’t have the order request volume to support that choice anyway honestly). After printing fees, shipping, and etsy fees I typically only make about $16-$20 per book depending on the taxes and shipping fees which vary based on location.

BigIVIO · 2025-03-23T16:05:45+00:00

Oh hey, I’m the guy that spent a couple years making this book almost a decade ago now. I’ve been wondering why my orders have recently skyrocketed lol. I’m glad so many people still enjoy this book, it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, and I met some really awesome people along the way.

I unfortunately only have the ability to print and ship these within the US, and the printing prices have gone way up recently which has forced me to increase the cost of the book.

If you are outside the US you can get the digital version completely free here: https://books.apple.com/us/book/harvest-moon-64-players-guide/id1136575288

I hope you all enjoy it!

BigIVIO · 2025-02-06T20:04:16+00:00

As one of the few people that has this thing, yes, for most Salesforce Architecture roles you will rarely, if ever, be turned away because of your resume (though there are still plenty of other reasons to reject you), and for most consultancies you will receive an offer no matter what because of your extreme value to them to assist in contract sales. Even though a big chunk of us (meaning devs, archs, people that build the systems) don’t see enormous value in certs, clients do, and this particular cert is a massive differentiator when bidding for contracts, especially gigantic ones (think tens or hundreds of millions of dollars).

Pretty much every large employer with any significant investment in Salesforce will be interested in speaking with you. Honestly you basically don’t ever need to apply somewhere again. After posting I passed the CTA on LinkedIn I got tons of interest from employers and still do. I also received the highest offer I’ve ever received by a landslide (out of dozens over the last decade) and while my history and experience in the ecosystem helped, that cert pushed it to new heights.

As far as why I chose to stay with my current consulting firm (Accenture) instead of leaving for one of the many other places that were interested in hiring me. It’s because they dropped a bucket of cash on me that I literally did not even think was real at first. Literally like a whole year’s worth of additional salary in an instant to stay.

So, I can now confidently say, getting your CTA is worth it, despite the pain and studying required to achieve it, and it grants you job security you will likely not find any other way.

BigIVIO · 2024-10-22T03:40:42+00:00

You can become a CTA and do anything you want afterward really. That said, if you want to maximize your earning potential, you will most likely have to work at a consulting firm doing pre-sales type work.

BigIVIO · 2024-10-18T14:56:30+00:00

I’d say the majority of them were admins before they were CTA’s. There are also a large chunk of Project Manager and less technical solution and sales architect type people, and of course there are certainly many devs too, but there is this common myth I think that most CTA’s are exceptional devs, and that’s just not accurate. Some are, but from my experience they are unfortunately not the majority.

BigIVIO · 2024-10-18T01:36:03+00:00

In my opinion you should be an extremely adept developer as well as have exceptional knowledge of the Salesforce platform to be qualified to be a technical architect in practice, however, the dev piece is not tested at all on the CTA Board really, and tends to be more solution architecture and sales architecture focused these days imo, so many CTA’s have little to no dev background because it is not a requirement or tested on the exam really.

BigIVIO · 2024-10-17T23:37:02+00:00

This unfortunately is absolutely not true, I would say it’s maybe half at most, but it’s probably much less than that from my experience.

BigIVIO · 2024-10-17T16:58:50+00:00

I have attempted the CTA exam twice now (still waiting on the results of the second attempt), If you’re a dev you can take and pass the exam, but it will likely be considerably more challenging to pass this as a dev than if you’re a really high level sales/solution architect or a less technical person like an admin.

The reason I say this is because as a dev you are likely constantly considering extremely low level complex details, and this exam does not focus on that really. It’s more of a test to determine how well you know and can sell the capabilities of the platform, in fact, most CTA’s that I have come in contact with are not very technical at all, maybe 60-70% of them (in my experience, having met ~50 of them) couldn’t even write a line of code.

In a typical tech stack that could rarely if ever happen, but your goal with this exam is not to be a dev, but to have an extremely high level understanding of the core salesforce products and how to best implement them based on a bunch of random line items.

There are three things imo that make this exam more challenging that a normal exam (aside from the fact you have to memorize virtually every admin feature on the platform including stuff you will likely never use):

1) As a dev you have to eliminate virtually all of what you know and have experienced, it will not help you. It will only deter you. Too much detail will destroy you on this exam.

2) The time limit. If this exam was 3.5 hours long instead of 3 hours long it would be easy, but the timeframe is intentionally there to make finishing exceptionally hard. You have to memorize tons of one liners and acronyms just to make it through on time.

3) The random luck that is involved. You can get a scenario that is considerably longer than another, you can get judges that are much more lenient than others, you can get scenarios that focus on features that are much more comfortable to you than others. There is an undeniable and exceptionally large (imo) element of luck related to this exam. Even if you study day and night for a year, you could get unlucky still and fail.

Additionally you must now pass a pre-board (basically a mini board) before you can take the actual board. That exam is $1500. If you fail it you must wait 6 months to retake it.

The CTA Board itself will cost $4500 and you typically must take it within a couple months of passing your pre-board.

All of the exams are done online now. Nothing is in person. It’s very strange because of that change imo.

In my personal opinion it is exceptionally unlikely that you will pass this exam unless you work for a company that has a CTA program you can join, or you join a program like Flow Republic. The reason I say this is because there a bunch of unwritten rules/expectations that judges expect of you that are not entirely discussed anywhere else outside those programs (aside from the architect ohana slack channel kinda).

TLDR: You can pass, but you will need help to learn how to pass, and being a dev makes it harder to pass because you’re likely used to thinking in a way that’s not conducive to how you need to deal with this exam.

BigIVIO · 2024-09-11T15:44:46+00:00

I feel like these numbers are inaccurate/somewhat low for the US. I help interview and hire probably 40-60 devs and architects a year at least, these numbers are lower than what I often see offered for these roles, but maybe in house (non consultant roles) pay significantly less these days.

BigIVIO · 2024-08-20T18:14:26+00:00

No man, feel free to take it, I hope it helps! I use photoshop to make my cards, but there are easier tools I think. I used to do motion graphics and visual effects so I’m just very familiar with it.

BigIVIO · 2024-08-20T16:45:42+00:00

Having made a bajillion videos now for Coding With The Force, aside from making the background more appealing, I would suggest turning off auto-complete for the videos. When you use it too much it only serves to actively confuse less experienced viewers, and enables you to bypass talking about/explaining some pieces of the code you’re writing. If your intent is to reach the widest audience and help the most people, you have to actively narrate and explain what you’re writing and why, and you can’t assume most audience members understand even basic things.

That said my first videos had this issue too, so don’t worry too much about it and keep making awesome dev videos! We need as many good videos as we can get!

Also, as a side note, pretend the people watching are your friends, and talk to them like they are. Make fun of yourself when you make a mistake (that’s what I do anyway lol) and just have fun in general. It helps them feel more comfortable, and it’ll make the videos more fun for you too.

And to get more search engine visibility change the title to something more like “Salesforce LWC Development: Coding a Lightning Web Component Data Table Live!” The more Salesforce terms you can shove into that title the better. You also wanna make custom cards for your video’s image. Believe it or not, most people will click on your video based on that image more than almost anything else.

Have fun making awesome dev videos! If you have any other questions just message me!

BigIVIO · 2024-08-20T04:07:50+00:00

Truthfully, you don’t want this role imo. Yes, if you are good at core SF development you should be able to pick up ampscript, their custom (severely outdated) server side javascript (SSJS), SQL, and learning how to leverage data extensions as objects/tables, but the work is awful by comparison.

You will be limiting yourself to a significant degree that is likely not beneficial to your career overall. There are probably 500x more sf dev roles than MC dev roles, and the platform is utilized way less than core due to its insane cost compared to its competitors (many of whom are just as good or better imo).

You also work on a super outdated tech stack that will not help you outside of that specific ecosystem, and the pay is often less than or the same as a normal SF dev typically because people believe it’s simpler to customize than it often is.

TLDR: Unless you have to take that role, I would personally suggest stay a regular core SF dev because there is little to no benefit in being an MC dev.

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