How to overcome “years of experience” requirements when applying for jobs | Hacker News Reader

How to overcome “years of experience” requirements when applying for jobs

workplace.stackexchange.com

143 pointstravelstacker73 comments

I think the op's point was completely ignored: Different people progress at different rates. When you're in high school, you have roughly the same amount of schooling experience as your peers. That doesn't change the fact that you may be taking advanced classes while they take remedial ones.

It's easy to accuse the op of arrogance. And who knows, maybe he is arrogant. But in the end, that's just an ad hominem and is insufficient for dismissing his point, which I believe is a legitimate one.

Sure there is a valid point in there, but I don't think it's one worth pursuing. If you make a fuss out of it then you're not really giving a good impression; you come off as a difficult person who is focused on the wrong things: in this case, the written requirements rather than end goal of judging if you are right for the company. No matter how demonstrably smart and skilled this kid is, I would walk out of the interview with the impression that all his brilliance is going to be misdirected and he'll be out in the weeds have the time because he doesn't have common sense about what's important.

Instead, just do like everyone else is saying and apply. If they reject you based on HR filtering then there's a good likelihood the culture would be bad for you in the long run anyway, if not then you put your best foot forward and if you're as good as you think you'll be snapped up before long.

It's amazing the amount of assumptions and prejudices being leveraged due to the perceived young age of the person inquiring. Especially given that there is nothing to indicate that he was making a fuss of it more than asking on StackOverflow.

Shockingly, some do progress at a faster rate than others. I turned in a large project that I wrote during my senior year of high school and received extremely high marks on it for my senior year project in a high(er) level CS course in University. I got positive remarks on architechtural decisions and things that come via experience and having experience with code. I've been doing it since I was in middle school, I finished a project for my first client before I started my senior year of high school. I still kick myself for not doing a partnership with the fellow the following summer; the idea he wanted me to implement became rather popular a few years ago.

Some people progress faster than others. It doesn't mean they're necessarily arrogant or full of themselves. It means that ageism and the notion that "more experience = more better" is silly. There is code I see churned out by developers that have resumes twice as long as mine that absolutely terrify me.

What does this have to do with my comment? My point was there is nothing to be gained by calling attention to and arguing about job requirements.

How is there not? There's an entire discussion going on about it here, and I don't think the conclusion to be drawn from it anywhere is that it's an entire waste of time. It's just another symptom of how it can be difficult to hire well and how miserably misplaced some efforts are to improve it by cheap metrics that can be both positively and negatively misleading.

I meant for the job applicant, not in general discussion.

I think the OP missed the bigger point, which is that knowledge comes at various speeds based on an individuals ability to absorb learning, but experience comes from hours invested and the variety of situations experienced.

The OP seems to have conflated the concept that someone asking for a certain number of years of experience are looking for a particular subject matter knowledge level, when they are really looking for someone who has experienced more variations.

When people talk about "What is the value of a college degree? I can already write code with the best of them!" they conflate what they know as equivalent with experiencing different things. Good college programs go through a lot of different scenarios quickly and that is how they substitute for some experience. But any trades person will tell you that learning the trade is both knowledge and experience. The former tells you how the latter tells why and with luck gives you the wisdom to choose the best "how" out of a number of choices.

Your argument is unconvincing.

It takes certain skills to be an effective "intermediate software developer." (Here I use the word skills very generically, so in particular it includes the things that you call experience.) If a hiring manager has found that many people have those skills after 3 years of work, it is probably true that some people have those skills after 2 years of work.

Therefore: the OP might have the skills to be effective at the job he wants. So for God's sake can somebody just give a good-faith answer to his question? The amount of condescension he's getting is ridiculous.

"So for God's sake can somebody just give a good-faith answer to his question?"

I think the point of the response was the question cannot be answered.

Specifically he writes:

"How can I overcome the assumption that I do not have the skills required because I do not have the 'right' number of years of experience?"

The answer is "You cannot, it is an assumption by someone you don't know." Since he is not asking "Should I ask a friend of mine that works at this place and knows my skills put in my resume even though I don't have the 'right' number of years of experience?" We could all say "Absolutely." Referrala are great because the knowledge is first person and in depth.

Our authored followed with:

"Are skills directly proportional to years of experience?"

And the answer to that is "Yes." Is the constant the same for everyone? No. But generally some hiring manager has put out this number because he's found folks who have that land in his range of what he wants for this job. But its easily shown that someone with some experience has some sigma greater skill at the job that someone with zero experience, so it seems pointless to simply say "Yes" here.

On the other hand, I think giving a range to 3-7 years implies that many people have, after 3 years of work, the skills that others have after 7 years of work. It's not unreasonable to say 3 is a stretch and 2 is right out.

The real answer, which is alluded to in your post, is that the years requirement is simply a mechanism to reduce risk and blame for the person hiring you. There are a few things to consider in these situations:

1. He is already being interviewed despite satisfying the years experience requirement. This means they are willing to ignore that requirement. (or I misread this and he never made it to an interview)

2. All new hires have a ramp up period. This costs money and a failed hire can be costly.

3. A hiring manager (or whoever has the final say) is the person who will ultimately take the blame for any failed hire.

Considering the above, there is really only one question that needs to be satisfied in the mind of the employer for any "inexperienced" candidate to get a job:

- Is the risk of hiring this person lower than that of all other candidates?

When you try to answer that question, you get a clear understanding of where the years requirement fits in and how it effects the go/no go decision. So let's see what risk factors are normally vetted out during interviews:

1. Skills - Can he do the job? (the well roundedness part of the answer falls here) Let's make the assumption that he can so the answer is yes.

2. Personality - Does he fit in with the team? (conflict resolution and all that other stuff in the SO post falls into here) Let's make another assumption that he can so the answer is yes.

3. Will he flake out? - This is where experience factors in heavily. Evaluating someone with very little work history makes this impossibly hard to get correct. With longer resumes, it is easier to have high confidence in making this judgement. 3 years is generally enough time to see if the candidate either stayed with one company for a long time or stayed at 2 companies for a long time. This is usually a good indicator that the candidate worked out well and can be trusted to contribute in the long run. This is also why jumping too many jobs in a short period of time (or over a career) is generally considered a bad thing. It makes you a very high risk hire.

When you are asked personal questions (where do you see yourself in 5 years, what do you do in your free time, etc), this is where you are given a chance to alleviate their concerns. Questions about prior work experience are also used to vet out a candidate's flakiness. Even someone with tons of experience can fail this part of the interview in which case they would also get rejected. Low experience candidates are simply starting with a -10 buff.

So to answer the OP's questions:

1. How can I overcome the assumption that I do not have the skills required because I do not have the "right" number of years of experience?

He must minimize the "Will he flake out factor?" Either ace the "flake out" part of the interview OR show yourself to be so outstanding with regards to skills and/or personality that they ignore your potential flakiness. The best way to do this is via skills. You can't be just better than your peers. You must be better than your seniors. Either show this through outside work (personal projects, open source contributions, etc.) or by impressing them with your knowledge. Based on what the OP wrote, he seems capable but doesn't STAND OUT stand out. The personality route is also viable but that is much harder to swing unless you know people in the company already.

In the case he didn't even make it to an interview, then he must rely solely on displaying his skills via his resume. Outside projects and open source contributions with a personal website (or a link to code repos) is the best way to accomplish this. If his resume looks generic, then it's no wonder he didn't make it to an interview.

2. Are skills directly proportional to years of experience?

No. I know some people who have been programming since they were 10. Coming out of college, they clearly have outstanding skills but zero experience. But as stated above, this is not the real reason why he was rejected (he should actually ask for feedback assuming he made it to an interview round).

Do hirers give feedback? When I was suddenly dropped from dropbox's interview process, and asked for feedback, I didn't get a response until my friend working there went and bugged HR, and then the response that did get sent was "we have no comment".

Sometimes. I interviewed a LOT out of college and often made it to 2nd and 3rd rounds. Every time I got rejected, I would pop an email to the HR rep and ask for feedback along with something like "thanks for the opportunity." Maybe 1 in 10 would respond and some 1 in 15 would actually give me feedback on how I did. So while it's a fairly low chance shot in the dark, you don't have much to lose by asking. Just be polite.

There is no incentive for them to give you such information, especially since it only helps you sue them.

"Do hirers give feedback?"

Generally no. All it does is open up the possibility of lawsuits and invite an argument. If you tell someone they were dropped from consideration for reason X then you invite the applicant to rebut that reasoning. But the truth is that the company has decided not to proceed and there is nothing the applicant can do about it. Thus folks who have been around the block a few times simply say, "We've decided not to proceed" and leave it at that.

That is a sad thing but I don't think it will change.

This is already built into the requirement: 3 to 7 years.

After three years he/she is open to apply for what might take others 7.

I totally agree: people do capitalize on experience at different speeds. That said, I think the op fails to put himself into the company's shoes. As one comment said, false positives hurt a lot, so these kinds of company will try to avoid them at all costs, even if it means weeding out very good candidates. Management consulting firms do that a lot for example.

As an employer, I give you this advice: Just apply.

We make exceptions for smart or motivated people all the time. After all, your resume's gonna be viewed by a human who'll give it a subjective assessment. If by chance the company you're applying to is so rigid in their standards that they can only make decision based on objective measures, it's probably not a company that you want to be at.

I fully agree, though I will caveat that many companies, mostly larger ones, have the vast majority of resumes funnelled through HR. HR may be much more inclined to just toss a resume that doesn't check every box that was listed as a "requirement" for the job than a hiring manager actually would. Of course, that may fall under the "it's probably not a company that you want" category, but it is well worth noting.

Which is why you don't go through HR. Every piece of hiring advice from a reputable source will tell you to find out who the person is making the decision and go to them rather than firing a resume to jobs@example.com. As patio11 said, "resumes are an institution created to mean that no one has to read resumes." [1]

[1]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

I've had experience in the past being referred for a job by someone on the inside, and still getting turned away by HR for undisclosed reasons. In some companies, even if someone wants to hire you specifically, HR still gets in the way.

Most large companies have a side channel where managers can say to HR, this is a viable candidate. HR still does the background check etc but they are verifying the resume not evaluating it.

That is how all of our resumes work; HR just verifies the information and has no role in determining whether someone is appropriate...unless it is for an HR job. Someone in our department must review every resume for the initial pass before HR begins the background checks or schedules interviews. It takes longer to hire someone but we know that nobody is making decisions for our department.

Every job I've had in the last 7 years has been from an employer or recruiter coming to me. Shooting off a resume through the typical HR stack is almost always a crap shoot.

I don't think that everyone can claim to have companies beating down their door.

If only. I wouldn't say I have companies beating down my door, I have to put my resume on monster just like anyone else. But in my experience the best job prospects come from someone finding my resume or from someone I know referring me.

If you write code and you don't have recruiters contacting you through LinkedIn, then you probably live in a city with a bad market (and you should move) or you don't have a thorough LinkedIn account.

I'd take that with a grain of salt if you (personally) only have worked in the Valley, where the job market is probably overflowing with developer positions, or NYC.

I've had one recruiter call me (at work no less!) and:

- He told me that he knows my company is a PHP shop, which it's not. We are almost 100% Perl and have never worked in PHP.

- He tried to entice me to pass the offer along to other people in the company, which I find very tactless.

- It was only for a 3 month Python job at ADP.

This is why IMO the current US anti-discrimination laws are fundamentally flawed, BTW.

like all discriminatory anti-discrimination laws ... I don't see how you can fight discrimination with positive discrimination tbqh.

In some company hiring systems, the resumes sit in an online queue and may well not be seen by a human. :-/

Same boat. Some of my most impressive hires have been fresh out of the oven so to speak.

In some markets, I think it would be pretty foolish to start putting blanket 'must have +years' experience on postings. It only takes a 15 min phone call to pretty quickly judge where someone is at to proceed further or not. I'd far rather 15min of my time sourcing diamonds in the rough, than eliminating them through poor job postings.

Years of experience is a farce typically made up by HR folks that have zero understanding or clue of the detail's they're hiring for.

Case in point for people looking for "10+ years of rails experience."

Secret tip:

1) Apply anyways. I got jobs just by showing interest and a willingness to learn anything.

2) Build cool, publicly usable and visible projects. Show your versatility to build and ship different kinds of projects

3) Show a knack for picking up languages and technologies quickly and in your own time. This is something you can't fake until you make it. Maybe consider using the technologies you're applying to use in a job.

4) For the really crazy and if it fits your situation, say you're wanting a good fit for everyone and have a few days or week you can chip towards coming in, hanging out and learning more about the company and job to see if it's a good fit for everyone, unpaid. Hiring is one of those decisions that people don't want to hire someone and make a mistake so they'll go for the safe candidate vs the best.

If they feel like keeping you on and paying you for the week, it's up to them. It's better to date before getting married anyways, right? The more you can act like management the greater chance you'll catch their attention and stand out.

The wrong kind of place might not take notice. The right kind will notice and like how you roll.

I guess that depends on what a year of experience unit is. 2000 hours? If you used Rails full time in your day job since it was released and built a Rails-based startup on the side, it could be possible to have 10+ unit-years of experience with it.

But yeah, it's a poor measure, plain and simple. Someone who tinkers with Rails one week out of each year could soon claim eight years of experience, even though they'll have no experience compared to someone who has used it in their full-time job over the same number of years.

You have a fair point and cool insight that I'm going to keep in mind :)

But does the average non-tech HR person recruiting have any awareness of this? I think they'd communicate it if they knew better, it would only make them better at their jobs.

> Case in point for people looking for "10+ years of rails experience."

"10 years of Rails and other object-oriented web development experience". (Or something along those lines to get past the HR filter.)

Sometimes requirements get mangled somewhere between the hiring manager and the recruiter placing the ad. But there are also a lot of phony ads out there, and I'd probably ignore a "10+ years of rails" one.

The top rated answer though is pretty priceless. The easy way to over come the experience requirement, is to put in the time. But the relevant response is that when you don't know what you don't know, you're not nearly as effective as you think you are. I remember being so depressed at Intel one day when I figured out I was tons smarter than this senior engineer I was working with but I didn't have a shot at his job until I had more experience.

I advise folks, don't rush, breathe, look around you, learn. And then apply all that. But recognize its very hard.

Generally the advice here to just apply is solid too. If the skill set matches I and any other hiring manager will give you a look. And experience comes even when it isn't 'paid' so doing projects in your spare time is also a great tool.

Was your story supposed to conclude with "then I got his job and realized how hard it was" or were you really smarter?

Lol, no I didn't stay long enough at Intel to qualify. They had hired me as a hardware guy, but between board bring up from a hardware perspective and a software perspective I found I generally liked the software work better and so moved on to Sun Microsystems.

I did however come to appreciate that even though things are "obviously easy" on the surface there could be mitigating factors which made that not true. My favorite example was 'give all the source code rights and IP to RPC/XDR to a standards body so that they can standardize it' (which I tried to do with the IETF in Amsterdam in 1993. Easy right? No so much. Not when other people don't want that to happen. So not a technical issue.

Chuck's the real deal. ;)

The top rated answer main point is also funny as well. It reminds me of my town. They are more than willing to vote for more services and while also more than willing to pay less taxes. In the short term, it's a party but in the long term it's a disaster waiting to happen.

People want everything for free. Or in this case, people want all the success without any of the failures which lead to that success.

Something I don't think everyone considers when they don't get a job is that probably somebody else did get the job.

Maybe you are very skilled but only have 2 years experience and someone else that applied is just as skilled and has 5+ years experience. Maybe they interviewed that guy first and liked him and didn't feel the need to interview anyone else.

Maybe you are very skilled AND have 5+ years experience, but the hiring manager/HR had a stack of 10 (20? 100?) resume's of equally qualified applicants and you randomly ended up on the bottom of that stack (You have a 50% change of ending up in the bottom half) And they gave interviews to the first 5 (or 10 or 50) and ended up really liking one of those guys.

It's funny.

Younger people on HN complain that it's impossible to get hired because they don't have experience.

Older people on HN complain that it's impossible to get hired because they aren't a fresh out of college 20 something who has time to code 24/7.

It is very possible for both those statements to be true.

I remember when I thought I was a badass programmer. Now, after almost two decades of it, I realize how little I know. IMHO, humility is the best sign of experience. That said, asking for a hard number (like 5 years of experience) is no guaranteed filter, but it probably will get you way better application results than putting the threshold at 2 years.

I fully agree. For most of my 3 decades in programming, I've considered myself a badass programmer, but in retrospect, there are always glaring mistakes that were not evident to me at the time.

One concrete benefit of requiring N years of experience, with N greater than 2, is that one of the major career learning experiences is to deal with one's own code in "maintenance mode", and you can only experience that if you have a number of years of distance from when you originally wrote the code.

Of course, requiring N years of experience is no guarantee that the candidate has dealt with this situation, as there are people who (consciously or not) structure their careers to avoid ever retreading their own code.

What the employer means in the context is that they want someone with practical experience with the tech; not just book-learning. All you have to do is display the experience that you have, or get some if you don't have it.

"We covered this in class" is generally useless, given the gulf between theory and practice. "I have app X in the app store" is priceless. Github profile, history of helpful posts in a related forum, stack overflow reputation - any of these can show that you've done the work before.

The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.

>The experience requirement is also used to weed out applicants who intend to read one book on the tech/language and learn the rest on the job. In some positions that is appropriate, in others it is not.

I'd go one further and say that almost every position is appropriate for this, it all comes down to the person's willingness and ability to learn quickly. Given the mindset of an average HR drone though, you almost have to fake it. I've found that being a quick learner doesn't mean much of anything when it comes to getting through the process, as it's not something you can readily prove.

I'll stand by my statement - smarts and experience are two different things, and some jobs require both.

When I need an iPhone or C++ expert, and Android guy who read a book or two will not fit the bill. I need someone with the fine-detail, nitty-gritty knowledge that only comes from working with a platform over time.

"Years of Experience" along with "Degree" are objective requirements that can simplify hiring. Some companies will be hard and fast about them, others will be more flexible.

But to note, if you want to claim that you have outstanding reasons why lack of years, or a degree, or a certification, or whatever ought to be disregarded, figure out why that is, and emphasize it.

If you have an active GitHub profile, an interesting blog, a self-published book - a great many recruiters will overlook their objective benchmarks.

Focus on your strengths, shore them up, and advertise them. Time wasted complaining that some recruiters are inflexible is not only pointless; it takes time away that you could be using to do something positive.

In my experience, companies that use years of experience as a candidate filter are not companies you would want to work for. Number of years of experience is easy to determine, but pretty much useless in determining someone's skill. What it really shows is that the people in charge of hiring are either lazy or incompetent. Neither speak well to the quality of people going into the company, so once again, why would you want to work for them?

>Number of years of experience is easy to determine

Only if defined in a naive way (i.e. ignore personal projects, work experience during middle school/high school/college, have some arbitrary way of interpreting what it means to have experience in a particular language.)

You can certainly make the number more or less meaningful by including a comparison against what the individual accomplished over that period. Regardless, the question was an individual's number wasn't high enough.

EITHER you made something great OR you have nothing to show and then it's really personal

In the end, once you have something to show, noone cares about your resumé and they all want you on board because you have shown that you can deliver and are a low-risk, high-return investment.

Employers use "years of experience" as a concise way of indicating roughly how much skill they're expecting, as much as anything else. If you think you have that much experience, apply anyway and let your CV speak for itself.

If the company is the kind that filters out qualified candidates on a technicality, well, hopefully you didn't really want to want to have your time wasted by a callback from that company anyway. I'd still suggest not directly mentioning it anywhere, though, just in case it prompts an HR person to skip your application without looking any closer. It also communicates a lack of confidence. Again, your CV should be able to speak for itself.

I have used "years of experience" as a shorthand for "we are looking for someone with mature judgement; who has been in many different situations and worked through them; who will stop and consider consequences before committing to risky ventures; who will not panic when faced with a new problem; who is likely to have learned from experience in a way which will benefit our company."

Perhaps I should spell that out in future, though.

This will be buried but I'll throw it out there anyway.

In the UK it's actually illegal to specify a minimum number of years of experience. The issue is that no-one enforces the rule unless someone kicks up a stink. In the UK, if you are rejected for a position implicitly because you didn't have the minimum number of years of experience you can claim compensation through the employment tribunal on the grounds of age discrimination.

UK law is black and white about the issue and I'm personally sick and tired of seeing employers and recruiters blatantly and ignorantly flouting the law.

Not doubting you in any way, but do you have a reference for that? Is it part of the Equality Act 2010?

I'd like to be able to say this with some authority (without it sounding like "this guy on the internet told me").

Sure. Some citations:

[1] http://www.xperthr.co.uk/faqs/topics/6,62/age-discrimination...

[2] http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1046

[3] http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=10...

[4] http://www.rightsatwork.co.uk/employment-law/age-discriminat...

[5] Anecdotal: http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/03/26/45050/look...

I recall vividly how two years after Java first came out, many would-be-employers in the banking sector started advertising heavily for 'Java programmers with minimum of five years experience'.

Years of experience is an easy way for a company to justify not hiring you. If you have the skills, you likely need to improve your skill at effectively educating people of your ability.

I recently went through something like this. I wound up getting the job, but only after my recruiter pulled a few strings. As an applicant, you can't do that so it's best you improve your communication so that after that first meeting they see your spark.

Most of the answers here and on stack exchange clearly show that the person answering has never been (or lots of time has passed since) in this position. I have been in this situation lots of times. Not only I didn't have the years, by I also didn't have the education. And have learned how to "beat" the system:

1. Be really good. You can't fake that. 2. In your resume, show your real skills and interests. Write details. Lots of details. But only details that are of interest to the current position. 3. Don't have a "generic" CV. Write one specifically for every other position you are applying to. 4. Do not be shy and provide references to hobby projects, freelance work and your ambitions (and also dreams). 5. Be humble. Never make comparisons with anyone. Just talk about yourself.

I have been in a hiring position lately, and I can see why this succeeded with me. Most of the candidates send shitty CVs. One can't judge them from the CV. For such candidates you can only guess from the years of experience. Don't be that guy. If you send me a CV that shows passion, knowledge, culture and determination, I won't look at the years of experience at all.

The original StackExchange thread is an interesting read. For the job applicant (any job applicant), the problem is always how to make an affirmative case that an employer ought to offer the job to you and not to someone else. The commenters on StackExchange and here on HN are mostly commenting from that perspective, that the job applicant has to figure out how to excel over other job applicants in making a strong case for being hired.

Some comments here are about the issue of how companies should hire in the general case. Because that is a frequently asked question here on HN, and because that has been the subject of much research, I'll recycle some electrons here to provide a FAQ on the general issue. The review article "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings"

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring practices. There are many kinds of hiring screens, such as resume reviews for job experience, telephone interviews, in-person interviews, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general cognitive ability test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than anything else that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

For legal reasons in the United States (the same consideration does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of a hiring process. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...

held that cognitive ability tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring process had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring process might be illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants and is not supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws.

I am still skeptical about the IQ tests and job-skill tests. They both seem to look at things at a very narrow timeframe. One could potentially have a high IQ and be great at a specific task, but it seems to say very little how this person is going to perform in future tasks - i.e. a brilliant mind, facing a challenging job skill task, might become highly bored or sloppy when settling in the day-to-day work frame. But I guess statistics and outliners have one way or another a problematic relationship.

I agree with you, but you can see that this test only had a moderate correlation with successful hiring. In the same way that screening for free-throw percentage doesn't provide the best catch-all way of hiring basketball players, an IQ test isn't going to be a perfect (or even nearly perfect!) way of hiring employees. The point was that it is one of the best ways we currently know how.

It does make sense though that companies might be looking for someone who has developed a sense of judgment over the years. Similar to how fathers (responsible ones) become less naive on decision-making as the family's dependency on him grow which is why we turn to him (or our mothers) for advise. Because they may be less skilled or knowledgable than us, but they've been around long enough to know how to react to difficult problems.

I think that is the most important aspect in achieving your goals in a company. You need effective decision making skills on top of your technical abilities.

I think the answer is you don't. People are really stupid creatures who prefer to hire not based on what's best but what they feel comfortable with. This results in 95%+ of people being hired not for what is best for them but of circumstance and of well, luck.

Think about it. How many well qualified resumes out there were discarded because the hiring manager was angry their football team lost yesterday? How many were lost during the office party? Probably more then we want to know.

One of the respondents makes the point that a company can loose a lot by hiring a bad candidate, but "false negative cost a company close to nothing."

While there is truth to this, I would say it is less true when there is a labor shortage. By not hiring a good candidate when they have the chance, a company looses the revenue that candidate might have helped them earn while they spend time looking for a surer bet.

When you come to talk about your experience, just say that although you've found the longer you have been a programmer, the harder it's been to avoid picking up bad habits and wasting time on pointless fads, you feel you are so far on top of the situation and your current weight of experience should not pose a serious problem for your prospective employers.

I just love when job ads require 2-3 years work experience, but also have a requirements list so long that would take 10+ years of dedication in 7 completely different, or contradictory, disciplines to qualify for the position.

Now Hiring: Visual Studio/.NET + Ruby on Rails developers with Oracle DBA and jQuery UI experience, XSL and Adobe Illustrator experience a plus

I'd say it depends. I could easily say sysadmin, Xen virt, SQL server, postgreSQL, jQ, Illustrator, python, java, html5/css3, extensive hardware understanding, infrastructure design and I've been working for 5 years or something... The difference is it's my passion and I was in hardware and computers way before it became my job.

What in my opinion doesn't match with those offers is their part of the bargain - they want a super motivated multitool expert . for peanuts ...

By the way. you have to realize that's all resumé warfare, they think you're going to exaggerate and they hope at best that you can code .Net, have touched RoR twice, used Toad for Oracle three times and had to implement a very small web frontend for basic purposes - and maybe that you had to design birthday cards in Illustrator.

Seems more likely with 2-3 years experience, doesn't it ?

You have to accept when things are out of your control. You cannot reliably get around job requirements. The best you can do is apply and make your case either on the application or your resume. It's probably better to work your way up in jobs requiring less experience than it is to fight the system as hiring managers have no reason to put their faith in you yet and most likely won't be easily swayed to let you slide on requirements when they believe skill and years experience are correlated.

That said, I have a little experience getting around requirements. I was recently offered a job and havent completed my college degree nor have I worked anywhere that gave me relevant experience (sort of). About two years ago I decided I would ignore the rules and simply start my own company sans degree or work experience. I was a self taught developer with nothing but fast food jobs to fill my resume with. I worked my ass off for two years for peanuts while building a portfolio and gaining experience. I took every opportunity that came my way including accepting a position on the board of directors of a charity and working under contract for a prestigious health education organization on a large publicly funded project. When I finally started applying for jobs I had built up a great looking resume in a non-traditional way and was able to get hired at my number one choice of all the paces I interviewed at. For all the interviews I did get, there were orders of magnitude more that I didn't and I didn't exactly meet the requirements for any of the jobs on paper but my own self-made experience allowed me to get a job despite that.

Now, my point is that you can overcome any requirements including years of experience by simply being good at what you do but you can't expect any employer to see that no matter how obvious it is as some people don't have the ability to see when it's appropriate to draw outside the lines so to speak and go strictly by the book. I'd submit that it's their loss and if you really are more skilled, the companies that recognize that are the ones you'll want to work for anyway and the ones who don't are most likely not a good fit for you to begin with.

"Years of experience" is a BS requirement from HR. You need to figure how how to convey to the hiring manager that you understand the work/problem and that you know how to do/solve it in a way that will suit them.

Read _Ask The Headhunter_. Really. Best job-hunting resource ever.

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