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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Agree with a lot of this and have seen a lot of similar stuff as a former developer gone cloud infra guy for most of my career now. The core problem, as he gets to in a lot of this, is that if you work on infra, you are seen as a pure cost, and not adding anything to "revenue" or "product" (which is of course false).

One of the most common patterns in hiring I see now is so exasperating it drives me to despair sometimes. You'll get a HR person or some clueless lead/hiring manager and they'll ask something like, "do you have experience with $X technology?"

Me: "Well, not directly other than in my personal labs, but I've worked with $Y, $Z technologies that do the same thing, and written my own version of this functionality from scratch and pushed it to $repo you can view here"

Hiring manager: "So, no $X experience then" *jots something down and you know you just failed the interview"

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I had that experience this week, but with $X as a job title instead of a technology.

Hiring manager: "I see your resume doesn't list 'Frontend Developer'."

Me: "I haven't had that exact title, but I have years of experience building front-end applications using the tools you listed."

Hiring manager: "Hm, it seems like you might not have enough experience as a 'Frontend Developer' for what we need."

they did you a favor. if the manager is that clueless, you probably don’t want to work for them.

I just had this experience a week ago. I've worked with C# commercially but for the past 4 - 5 years I've been working with TypeScript mostly.

There was a fun HR girl that sent me a message how she found my profile compelling and we should schedule an interview. I said why not. After 45 minutes of asking me all sorts of questions, she asks if I have experience with .NET 5.

I went on to tell her that for the past years I haven't worked with .NET (though this was obvious from my CV) but have worked across multiple stacks, heavy TypeScript which shares a type system and the same creator bla bla. Then she asks but have you worked with .NET 5? I told her I worked with .NET Core for personal projects, but when I was working in .NET there was no .NET 5. And she stopped it there. "I'm sorry but I don't want to waste your time, they are looking for someone with .NET 5 experience."

Honestly, it's so stupid. I have more than a decade of experience working with software, been founding engineer, CTO, not shabby at DS&A. I can't imagine what kind of company would let their talent pool be so limited by such a factor. Unless you're doing some heavy .NET voodoo, but this wasn't the case.

The trick is to say that you do have .NET 5 experience. That 25 yo female recruiter hired for looks won't be able to stop you.

You'll then get an invite to the technical interview where you can talk to people who actually know whether C+ exists.

Yea, it's gotten to the point where you just have to say "YES" to every obvious gatekeeping/filtering question. Whatever it takes to get to the next gate. Out of 10 written job requirements, only 1, maybe 2 are actual dealbreakers. If the job really requires specifically .NET 5, then the technical interviews will grill you on it, and you'd fail for the right reasons.

>Hiring manager: "So, no $X experience then" *jots something down and you know you just failed the interview"

I've had that happen before. It seems like many hiring managers just look for those who check as many boxes on the application as possible, without regard for which of those skills are actually needed for the position.

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