Are Software Development market expectations a bit ridiculous?

I’m looking at quite a few vacancies and the expectation seems a bit ridiculous sometimes, how can you possibly have all these attributes?

I’m not unintelligent but it seems unrealistic

"Solid C#, C++ and Python coding skills
"Experience with JIRA
"Experience with Docker, Kubernetes
"Javascript is a must
"Powershell
"Bash scripting

Why not go a step further?

"Fluent in speaking only in quotes from historical figures
"Must be fully gracious towards holier-than-thou management and ooze gratitude for every single breath of air that they allow you to breathe.
“Can speak Japanese, Mandarin, English, French, Hungarian, and Twi. $5 per annum.”

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You’re looking at the wrong companies. No one ever got rejected for a job for not having jira experience.

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Relevant:

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Thanks, maybe I’m being too absolute about what they’ve written, it’s DevOps “Engineering”, which seems to be a half-way house role between infrastructure and development which has just popped up.

I’ve had a look at some tutorials online and it seems identical in concept to the web TFS thingy Azure Devops dingler doodly-doo, so I’ll just say I’m an expert. :rofl:

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Maybe it’s time for companies to reevaluate their whole HR process, which too often is very hard to evaluate.

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I don’t think it’s the process or the companies, but the industry.

Everything is a three letter acronym, a stupid jargon name, or prefixed with “continuous” or “agile”.

Can’t i just put on my CV “Give me a few days, i’ll get it working”

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I really do think it’s the HR process, not the industry. The unrealistic requirements is a well-known joke amongst IT people (exhibits a and b provided by @qwert_zuiop). Every IT people that’s been long enough in the loop also has enough horror stories about HR and the recruiting process.

I’ve been ghosted numerous times even when all I was getting was positive feedback (a team lead saying I was a good fit, asking me to interview with his team members, then the Indian subcontractor in charge of setting those interviews ghosting me). HR people without any software competences using ATS, thereby kicking dozens of qualified applicants out of the recruitment loop. HR reading two lines from my CV and making assumptions that exclude me from the loop (one saw I got a PhD from an American uni, concluded I didn’t have the proper permit to work in Europe, in spite of me being European). Or HR coming up with knowledge quiz with questions to which all answer are correct–but you can only choose one answer.

With such mediocre people in the system it’s no wonder then that good recruiters charge 20 to 60% of the candidate’s first year salary.

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HR writes this and when you hear her cute voice over phone say trust me, I will get the job done.

I can imagine a certain sort of job where that particular list would make sense. But I feel your pain, and I think @Baxter is right: the main problem here is the HR department, which is the modern refuge of people who aren’t qualified to do an actual job but still want to draw a salary.

It has always been the nature of software engineering that things move so fast - with fashionable tools, concepts, or hardware popping up and disappearing within the space of a few months - that learning stuff on-the-fly used to be accepted as normal. Just bear in mind that some things on the list are genuine “must haves” while a couple of the others should be negotiable. Any reputable company will tell you which is which.

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I didn’t know it as a well-known joke but I know now! :smiley:

Thinking about it some more, in my IT career I don’t think I’ve actually dealt with HR at all. Certainly with my last one I bypassed the company’s recruitment process altogether, so maybe I don’t have the experience with HR to comment. removes HR experience from CV :smiley:

It depends what you consider “experience” as well, for example, Powershell - I wrote one script to solve a problem about a year ago, took me about half an hour. it gets executed multiple times per day. It’s effectively some conditional command line execution and automation. Does that mean I’m experienced with Powershell? I’d say no, but then maybe I’m wrong.

こんにちは、你好,Hello, Bonjour, Jó napot… don’t know Twi actually.
Application DENIED.

Appreciate your comments.

= :poop:

Absolutely horrendous

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In my experience (at least in the US), they don’t actually require you to have experience or knowledge in everything they list. Besides, it’s usually someone with tech knowledge that goes through your actual tech background with you, not HR.

Also, they often add a few extra years of required experience. If they’re looking for something like 3 years of experience, for example, the ad will list 5 years.

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Every time I press the ‘buy’ button on anything, there’s always a nail-biting 30 seconds where I expect it to crash, hang, or throw up some mysterious error, and I’m often suitably rewarded (depends a lot of the merchant, of course). Now I know why.

Like 10 years experience in a platform that’s been around for only 2 years and not even the founder of the platform would qualify?

Yeah that’s common. Those job requirements are written by non-tech people, and are more of a… reference… than an actual requirement.

Unless you’re going for a senior or lead role, in which case they expect that level of experience and will filter you out.

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Just my annual update to say I still hate the software development industry. Loose coupling and associated patterns have all the function and purpose of a fucking tarot card reading, except more Judgement, less Magician, and The Empress is never fucking happy.

Let’s just make shit that works, instead of endless postpones and delays to the customers :clap:

See you in twelve months, thread.

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This.

These last few years I’ve had to deal with IC vendors getting clever with their demo code. They put layers and layers of abstraction between the hardware registers and a set of “easy to use” function calls for peripheral initialization. It’s all baroque nonsense trying to make hardware differences between different chips in a series ‘disappear’ - and it simply doesn’t work, because at some point the developer has to be aware of those differences. And those “easy to use” functions ultimately just end up shifting and ORing a bunch of bits into the hardware registers.

I mean, that’s fine if it’s a USB driver or something. Makes sense. But not for a fecking UART. Just show me what the registers do.

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Don’t even know what half of that means, too low-level for my spaced-out potato of a brain.

Been looking at something in .NET called MediatR - it’s just depressing, over-complicated, and generally bullshit, impossible to debug, and obfuscates code errors.

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