You're saying that in isolation. If you have 50 other resumes on your desk for a React job, there's no way you're going to choose the guy who hasn't touched front-end since 2012.
I'd love to have someone apply to a .NET desktop app position with 5 years of solid experience building Java web services. I'd love to fill a Node.js web service position with at least someone who spent 10 years writing embedded C for home automation devices. Hell, I'll take a brand new CS grad who built a janky Unity3D app in their spare time, not because it was a school project, but because they just wanted to.
What I get is IT network technicians who took a programming certification, substitute teachers who 15 years ago did software QA testing, public policy majors who dabbled with Matlab or Python in grad school, boot camp grads who haven't touched programming again since they finished their 8 week course 10 months ago. People who have never had any experience with the care and feeding of any kind of software project that other people had to work with them on for any significant time.
I'll get 1 resume out of the batch (and they always come in groups of 10) that is just a software developer: for whatever N years of experience, at least the most recent .8N has been software. Then it comes down to figuring out if they were actually a contributing member or spent most of their time hiding in a large team.
We're all out here shedding a tear for you. Not too sure what you expect, as they say, the real talent doesn't need to apply to job postings and submit resumes blindly. With that said, is there anything in your .NET desktop job posting that would encourage a Java web service developer to apply? The first day of every month a bunch of people with widely varying backgrounds and experience post on this very site that they are seeking work... ever reach out to any of them?
I’ve been warming up my network like crazy over the past four months, preparing my resume and career document, etc. I keep my network semi-warm regardless.
When the day came and I had the offer to quit and get big check or stay, I chose the quit option, before my last day, I had one manager trying to create a position for me, a second round scheduled with another former company and a third and final round scheduled at a third company.
All based on networking.
It’s foolish in this market to hope something is going to happen quickly by randomly uploading your resume to an ATS and keyword stuffing your resume like an SEO technique from the 90s trying to juice your position on Altavista.
On the hiring side, a hiring manager also needs a network that they can call on when trying to find candidates.
I think there's a huge valley of difference between "no relevant job experience" and "real talent". I do a mix of job postings to stuff that looks interesting while also talking to my network.
I mean obviously it depends on a bunch of other stuff in the resumes and during the interview process. But no, it's not a huge advantage to know React or have done front end development recently, just because we do some front end development in React. It's like the tenth most important consideration for whether someone would be a valuable contributor.
I kid.
Sure, you wouldn't be as fast as someone who has worked with these tools a million times, and sure, that would matter if you're being hired on a three-month contract to build something and part ways. But if you're being hired to be a valuable contributor and leader at a company, this learning period is going to come out in the wash.
Let me give you an example: At my current company, by my estimation our MVP employee on the engineering side spent most of his career making video games, largely within the Microsoft stack. We do python, go, and React. If we hadn't hired this person because he had never used any of those technologies, that would have been, by a very long shot, the stupidest decision we ever made. This stuff just. doesn't. matter.
And at this point in my career I’m looking for lead positions. Would you hire me to lead your front end efforts?
(my area of expertise is enterprise app architecture/dev + AWS. As a developer I spent most of the modern era of my career working with Node, C# and Python).
You are right though that I wouldn't hire you to lead a dedicated front-end team. But I'd prefer not to have such a team to begin with. But I'd be happy to hire you[0] to lead a product team working on a product that requires a front-end to succeed. Either other members of your team will know how to make that part work well, and I would expect you to learn quickly from them, or I would expect you to figure it out and then teach the rest of the team.
[0]: I'm using "you" as a stand-in for someone with your experience, who is otherwise a good fit for the organization. I may well not hire you in particular and suspect you would not take a job from me in particular, since we clearly have very different philosophies on specialization vs. generalization and investment in employee training, such that we may not enjoy working together :)
The software dev job market is cooling down. Making good choices on what to build experience in is more important than it has been in recent years.
I think many companies, including mine, are thinking they have only a few spots to fill and a lot of candidates to consider. I know we consistently say things like “who will be productive quickly?”
The model I've seen at startups is an approximately two-year cycle of 1. raise money against a couple year plan of milestones, 2. hire quickly on the back of that raise, 3. use that personnel growth to hit those milestones, 4. go back to 1.
Importantly, the large bulk of the hiring happens around those post-raise points, when there is a couple years of runway. And the idea of startups is to be ambitious and forward-looking, not myopically churning on short term features.
I would submit that it's even more important for startups to be focused on investing in the right team during those scale-up periods, because many of those people are going to be the leaders during the next round. You want people who are going to be strong stewards of your business as it grows, not just people who see themselves as "react devs" or whatever.