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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

> Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"

Or when they want years of experience with a specific framework, library, or other system.

I remember looking at Java positions last year (before I got my current job), and a lot of them would sound nice until I got to the item about "Must have X years of experience with Spring".

Yeah, I have a whole bunch of core Java under my belt, and I made the requirements for everything else, but because I don't have experience with that one library, I'm shut out.

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In my experience, almost all of those "must have X years of experience with Y" requirements are written up by HR people who are loosely interpreting poorly understood requirements told to them by either the hiring manager, or other HR people. In many or most cases, the people writing up those job postings are not the same people who would be interviewing or hiring you, and they're more aspirational requirements than anything else. They hope that someone with X years of experience with Spring will magically come out of the woodwork and send them a resume, but they're just as likely to hire a fresh grad who doesn't know anything about Spring other than what they skimmed on Wikipedia right before going to the interview. And the people doing the interviewing and hiring might actually be fine with that.

Basically if something looks perfect except for some random "must have X years of experience in Y" requirement, just apply anyway. Most likely it won't be a dealbreaker for them (the hiring manager at a decent-sized company may not even know that that was in the job posting), but the worst case scenario is that you won't get the job but will get some good interview experience.

Why would I want to apply to a company that has demonstrated they don't know much about technology?

Because (taking the comment in its context) you need to get a first job so you haven't so many options and you have nothing to lose. If you're some genius maybe Google had already recruited you right from uni.

You'll normally get screened out by their automated filtering tools if you leave anything off.

That's why so many people lie about their experience on their resume, and I don't blame them.

I remember shortly after Oak was renamed Java (so, maybe 1995? Certainly before the Java 1.0 release), at my startup, we wanted a Java person even if we had to retrain a C person. I gave my must-have/nice-to-have sheet to whoever was responsible for staffing and was surprised a week later to see a "Must have 5 years experience with Java" on the posting. When I asked her about it, she said that she had cribbed it from a Tivoli recruiter!

A few years later, I was applying somewhere (Samsung?) for a semiconductor design position - and they wanted 5 years experience on "Mentor Graphics 8"[0]. I was semi-fluent on "Mentor Graphics 6", but that was a no-go.

It sounds as if things haven't changed.

[0] The naming scheme has changed, so this nomenclature is itself a no-go today.

I graduated in 2000, and I applied for a company doing telemetry processing in Java. I learned Java in 1997 (because Gosling was a PhD student at CMU a little before that time; we eat our own dog food). When I interviewed they asked me all sorts of questions about Java (GC, JIT, JVM, bytecode, etc) and I passed with flying colors. However, they said they wanted someone with more Java experience and I was rejected.

Two weeks later I got a callback from them saying they wanted to offer me a job. I had already accepted a position. This is when I figured out that hiring managers have no idea about the talent pool they're dredging.

This company wasn't even in SV. They should have offered me a job on the spot, because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.

Hilarious but said.

Perhaps the metric is inverted. Instead of years per language, it should be languages per year. Any software job today requires people that learn new stuff fast, not experts in 5 year old frameworks.

> because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.

Because you even knew the word "Java"!

We were somehow part of a swirling cloud of folks somehow trying to buy Lycos about then. I don't know that CMU knew how to think about pricing such things. At least not the parts we were talking to. IBM seemed to be getting on with Doug Tygar's Citadel group, though, so it might have just been us that didn't know what we were doing! :-)

That's a huge problem in the Javascript space, especially considering how quickly it moves.

As far as I'm concerned, if a candidate has experience with Ember or Angular, I would never turn them down because they have not yet had the opportunity to work with React. A little bit of on-the-job training and some trial by fire, and most likely they'll be fine.

If I'm ever on the hunt for a new employer, I'm looking forward to getting turned down because I don't have 2 years experience working with Vue.js. It's idiotic, but I can guarantee it'll happen.

Apply anyway.

Eh, that was a year ago. I've since moved on to a position I like at a company I like.

If people shopped for food like they hire engineers, they'd starve to death. I have to wonder if there's not some "corporate anorexia" thing that shares pathology with food disorders.

I cringe when I see "More than 10 years experience in Ruby on Rails required" or "5 years experience in React required"

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