Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Hiring
Some of these are wrong. Number 2 is an example. A company with a req out specifying that it wants n years of Angular experience won&#x27;t countenance you if you don&#x27;t have n years of Angular experience. For unpopular tools (e.g., MUMPS, COBOL) they might be willing to onramp complete neophytes just to avoid paying the high prices the dwindling number of experts can command. But for in-demand languages and frameworks, the company can always hire, and will always prefer, someone who can &quot;hit the ground running&quot;. If a company is flexible about experience, they will say so by not mentioning the exact tech stack used and&#x2F;or by saying something like &quot;Need 5+ years of object-oriented (C++, Java, C#, etc.) experiencr&quot;.<p>Number 3 is spot on. You can meet all the requirements, but if you don&#x27;t have the &quot;soft skills&quot; and are not a cultural fit, you will NOT be hired. Introverts may as well find another line of work, especially since you will in most cases be working cheek-by-jowl with your co-workers at long noisy tables, individual desks having followed individual offices into the dustbin of office-layout history.<p>My parents are trying to get a dog. Back in the day they could go over to a friend&#x27;s house and pick a puppy out of a crate for free. Today the easiest place to get a dog is at a rescue shelter -- and they charge high fees (still lower than breeders) and make you fill out long application forms. They can do this because they have way more prospective dog owners than they have dogs. The shelter is looking for an ideal &quot;forever home&quot; for each dog, and the list is long enough to where they probably donpt have to countenance anyone less than ideal. They also face stiff liability if they let a dog fall into substantially less than ideal hands.<p>It&#x27;s the same with tech jobs, although if adopting a dog were really like getting a tech job, the dog shelter would give you a week to build a bespoke doghouse as part of the application process, evaluate it for safety and comfort, and still give the dog to someone else leaving you with no dog to put in the doghouse you built. But the principle is the same: companies are awash in candidates and can afford to be as picky as they need to be to put together their special-snowflake software teams.