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Comment by fathermarz | Hacker News Reader

Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”.

What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon?

Then it hit me.

Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in the hype without understanding the fundamentals.

GREAT. Even as I climb the AI-Native ranks, I apparently am unqualified for any AI-Native job.

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Just in case, because a lot of people don't know this... When a company lists job requirements they aren't really requirements. Don't skip a job because it says you need X years of Y but you only have X-1.

They're basically writing down a wish list. They don't expect to get it or necessarily even care that much about some of the points.

Also "X years of experience" isn't really asking for literal years. It's a proxy for skill. They mean "as good as the average person who has been doing this for X years". If you're really good at it and can demonstrate it, that's good enough.

yeah the lead lecturer on my data engineering masters once told us about a job posting he saw asking for 8 years of Hadoop experience, even though Hadoop had only been publicly available for 5 years at the time.

it's often HR / hiring managers throwing some numbers into a text document based on what they've heard is important for the role, not what you'll actually need for the job.

similarly, something like "has previous experience with kubernetes" doesn't usually translate to "knows absolutely everything there is to know about kubernetes". it means "you've used it at least once, ideally more, but can at least talk about when / how you used it / what problems it solved and could probably get up to speed on it fairly quickly when you join and/or in the time before you join" (kinda writing this last bit about an interesting job posting i saw that i've been talking myself down on and i really ought to be doing the opposite).

If a tech company can't even do basic math — or rather, openly cares so little about accuracy — does that sound like a place you would want to work though?

this sort of thing happens more often at larger non-tech enterprises, or places that have a type of "software team" that is not the main focus of the org.

The recruiters who make these boneheaded mistakes are typically organizationally separate from the actual engineering group you'd be working in.

> Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon?

Not that I am trying to excuse it, but this is not a new thing, nor specific to AI.

Job listings that ask for X years of experience where X years is sometimes literally longer than the technology has even existed has been a staple complaint of developers over my entire career, and I'm old af.

A 10x engineer only needs about five months of experience.

So, leave college/uni with your "Desmond" (1) in comparative pornography in Feb 2026, buy a PC/Apple and by now you will be writing Windows Entra 2027 on your own.

Profit!

(1) Tutu - geddit!

My favorite in this regard is this story: https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830?lang=en

Sebastián Ramírez seeing a job requiring 4 years of experience with FastAPI, the library he created 1.5 years before that posting.

HR always adds a lot of years of experience.

Even when Java 1.0 came out, HR was asking for 4-5 years of experience.

Seems like a decades long problem with people writing the job descriptions don't actually know what the job is.

Use it in your favor.

You just have to get past the recruiter/talent acquisition where everyone else is getting auto-rejected. You should be doing that anyway.

If decision-makers put up a front of recruiters and talent acquisition "specialists", don't they send a very explicit message that going past those is unwelcome and won't be considered?

Not really.

In practice, skipping the line is THE approach. How many times do you hear people say to fill out online job postings? Never. It's just scaring off good/bad candidates and bums who dont have an employee referral.

It's not even cynical to say a lot of postings are performatory compliance steps when they've already got internal candidates lined up.

There’s a big problem with hype now, that’s for sure, but what you’re describing also reminded me of the companies that were asking for 5 years of Java experience in 1999.

I guess maybe they were all trying to hire Gosling and his colleagues? …

If you were screwing around with Auto-GPT in 2023, you'll hit four years of "agentic" experience next year.

Of course, there's not much overlap between that and the way it works now. But then again, I have the same feeling about last year and this year... (e.g. Anthropic just deleted almost their entire system prompt because the models have common sense now.)

That being said, I think there's still value, even today, in playing around with the older models from time the time. (Or with very small recent models, which have similar limitations.)

Some of the habits that teaches you — i.e. careful context management and well crafted examples — do translate well to the modern environment, and give you performance gains and cost savings even with newer models. (In a word, whenever possible, show, don't tell.)

I also lament the loss of the base/text models, which were extraordinarily interesting and fun to play with. But that's a separate discussion :)

Personally, I would avoid "ai-native" companies like the plague; they seem like places full of burnout and delusional expectations.

I’ve been playing with LLMs since 2021 that’s what, 5 years now? I was lucky cause I knew David Holz and he gave me early access, but that’s what companies want to hire, people who get early access to frontier stuff.

People forget that prompt engineering all started with midjourney and diffusion vision tools way back.

Maybe they mean agentic man-years? So if you are juggling 5 of the for a year you get there

bro, tech hr were asking 6 to 8 years rails experience before dhh (rails creator) was even born.

This has been almost a meme on hacker news for some time. You can google it via hn dot algolia dot com by using the right keywords.

Of course, i exaggerated it a bit, just like a lot of startups and vcs pimp their stuff, just that they do it much more, and they do it for money, while my mine was for fun. ha ha ha.

Wow, fuck.

Literally some minutes later, i scrolled down below my above comment.

And saw this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053201

Which doesn't validate mine, but agrees with what I said.

Except that it was posted about one hour before mine.

go figure.

double wow. yet another one on the same lines, as a reply to the link i posted above.

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