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

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

#21

Post by randomdata »

j45 wrote: post #15

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 p…

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.

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

#22

Post by gavanwoolery »

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.

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

#23

Post by InclinedPlane »

timwiseman wrote: post #10
imjk wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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

#25

Post by ChuckMcM »

tedunangst wrote: post #11
ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

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…

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.

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

#26

Post by hdctambien »

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.

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

#27

Post by ChuckMcM »

csallen wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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

#28

Post by yuhong »

imjk wrote: post #3

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.

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

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

#29

Post by j45 »

randomdata wrote: post #21
j45 wrote: post #15

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 p…

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 h…

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.

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

#30

Post by Tycho »

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.
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