First of all, it depends on who you are applying with. State agencies, state federal contractors, and large enterprise organisations take the requirements list very literally (and may be limited by legal requirements). Having participated in the other end of the process, we literally had to remove applications from consideration by well qualified candidates <i>in our own organisation</i> because they answered &quot;no&quot; to one of the required job items while other candidates that seemed to be lacking even basic written English skills were still left in the initial pool for consideration because they made sure to answer &quot;yes&quot; to all the required items.<p>Other employers have much more flexibility but may be looking for candidates that have demonstrated experience in professional development as they don&#x27;t want to waste time bringing them up to speed on &quot;what is a version control system&quot; kind of questions. It can take 3-6 months to bring even an experienced programmer up to speed on how other developers run things in a company. On the plus side, you&#x27;re unlikely to have learned any bad habits from your previous employer that you would then have to &quot;unlearn&quot;.<p>As most people suggested, you&#x27;re probably better off spending 6 months to a year at a junior job. And it really has nothing to do with skill levels, but with learning how to work in a dev team, which you can&#x27;t really pick up on your own. After you&#x27;ve gotten up to speed the first time, you&#x27;ll probably start to be bored. This is a good sign as it means you&#x27;re ready to &quot;level up&quot; and find a different job (even if it is in the same company).