I mean if you are calling something "entry level position" and have "requires 3 years experience in the field", I'd expect people to apply anyway. I remember when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience. If you don't apply to those positions then you really aren't applying to anything.
Same. That struck me as particularly BS'y. I asked career counselors at my school about that and they said to "embellish" my background a bit, but not to lie. The specific advice I got was if you worked as a developer on a short term project a year ago that would count as a year of work. If asked about it the advice was to just explain what you really meant. It made me feel uneasy because if seemed disingenuous, but I went with it because I needed a job.
This made me really question what does a "year of experience" really mean? 60 Hrs/wk for a year is not the same as 20 Hrs/wk for a year. If you could use a month of work a year ago as a year of experience, what else could you stretch? At that point you could question what does anything really mean on an application? If it has super high qualifications, how could you take it seriously? You can just rationalize away anything! Can't you? 4+ years of experience? I basically got that. 2+ years in some specific programming language? How different could it be from C++? I got the basic concepts down, I can figure out the rest, just give me money!
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take and the worst you will hear is the word 'no'. You need a job to pay off the loans you needed to get the degree to apply to the jobs in the first place. If experience inflation is a reaction to an insurmountable volume of applications then what businesses are really doing is filtering out the honest people.
I would love to see job postings that require 2,000+ hours of experience for junior level or 10,000+ hours for senior level.
Figuring out skill level is hard. And no matter what job you are at and skill level, it requires training. But if we're talking junior positions, that means "we are going to teach you." I feel like that part is being lost.
Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of exposure to half of them. It's not surprising that unreasonably underqualified people respond to job postings with unreasonably high expectations, and that all job postings end up not being taken seriously.
This is what you put in a job advert when you want to hire your mate who matches that description but feel obliged to publicly tender the job instead.
Can I not work in tech without being passionate?
Nobody goes to work at Facebook or Google thinking "wow, I'm so passionate about adverts and tracking, I want to build a world with more ads and tracking in more places". It's normal not to be passionate about your work in that sense.
However, some people find computers frustrating, stupid or boring. Such a person probably wouldn't enjoy a job working with them all the time - and it's difficult to build the skills that let you advance your career if you're averse to or bored by practising them. You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it.
That is a major abuse of "passion". While the original definitions are even stronger, something you are "passionate" about is something you actively seeking out to do. Something that is merely "sufficiently non-loathsome" is not a passion.
That is a major abuse of "passion".
I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. Someone I can promote, and trust with more responsibility and less supervision.
But I'll tolerate someone who does 75% of the expected amount of work, because I'm realistic about the hiring market.
I had a job where I did this. Know what the employer did? He whined I wasn't doing enough, and gave me more to do then expected me to stay even later to do it.
I was eventually spending more time at work than I was at home - I no longer work for free. If an employer wants extra hours out of me, they pay or I head home at clock out time.
Employment isn't about your dream being fulfilled, it's a commercial agreement between two parties where one agrees to pay the other for time spent at the workplace. I don't live to work, I work to live, and I have other stuff to do.
On my death bed, the one thing I can guarantee that I will never think is "I wish I'd worked an extra evening for free on that project for my employer." It's far more likely to be "I wish I hadn't worked that evening for free, so I could have seen the sun set just one more time."
"sufficiently non-loathsome...motivate yourself to do it" is a far cry from passionate. Tangentially related @sarahmei on twitter wrote a thread about passion in tech. IMO she nails it: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/921366047122268165
Which is a shame, because her point that filtering candidates based on their dedication of personal time to tech is discriminatory is valid.
she conflates passion with external signals like
"spending a lot of time on personal projects"
If someone tells me they're passionate about embedded electronics, I'll ask what they've worked with - arduino? raspberry pi? esp8266? atmel? pic? mbed? - and what they've done with it.
If they haven't used any of them, or they've barely used them, are they really passionate?
It's funny really because I thought I was perfect for software development as a teenager. Already knew how to program, spent a huge amount of my free time on a computer, good at maths and sciences in general, etc.
Once I actually got into software development I found the whole thing rather irksome. The company I worked for was a great place to work full of really lovely people, free lunches, paid internships (yay NZ), etc. But software development? Nope. Awful industry. Computers are shit.
As soon as I got out of software, I immediately found my interest in programming as a hobby come back. Unsurprisingly people don't really like doing something as a hobby when they're paid to do it for 40 hours per week already.
I sure as hell wouldn’t hire someone who has no interest in what my company is doing and that level of interest would have to increase relative to the role.
What tends to happen is you get very slick operators who don’t produce anything because they don’t understand/don’t care and all they do is get information from A spin it in a way that makes them look fantastic and push it to B.
Given enough people like that in a tech org it’ll collapse.
(Also, it's an insufferably pretentious question, even if not actually illegal.)
[1] E.g., it might be legally acceptable for a role in a religious organisation.
What do you stand to learn about the quality/fit of a candidate from the question "why do you want to work with us?"
They could give a 100% bombshell answer and yet not at all fit the role.
And yes, a person who'll very occasionally stay late and pitch in when the whole team is crunching on something.
It takes time to learn a topic, that's a form of passion - a drive.
That's not to say you have to burn all hours on it tho. Which I think is what you're assuming there. That's honestly somewhat unhealthy and only super passionate people (and lucky ones at that) can do that for any length of time.
One requires motivation, but that motivation does not necessarily have to be interested or passion.
That’s what motivated them to learn. I doubt that’s what causes them to stay. If it is tho... That’s enough.
You can, but from the employer's perspective many markets have more applicants than positions. The employer can choose those who are closer to the ideal employee. One of the qualities of such an employee is often someone who throws themselves with passion into doing the job.
Put another way, why should an employer with a stack of applicants pick those who aren't as motivated or qualified as others? That is why entry-level positions require 3 years of experience.
Tech is not something special, you can lean it like anything else.
If they want 10 years of Ruby/Rails experience with a focus on performance/scalability, maybe your 5 years of Python/Django is not applicable.
But if they want 3 years of Ruby/Rails experience and you've got 5 years of Python/Django, and feel comfortable with the transition to Ruby, absolutely you should apply for that position.
Be upfront about it and be prepared to demonstrate your ability, but that's what the interview is supposed to be about in the first place.
2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview.
3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and increased interest in "working in tech" (without any personal interest / passion in technology)