What do you think about applying (or hiring) applicants who have experience but not in the specific stack of the job? I’ve found jobs in fields I’m passionate about, but I don’t always have matching experience in the stack. Does YOE matter more than stack or is stack experience quintessential?
Ex: 5yrs experience in C++ but the job asks for 5yrs experience and Node.js
I hire developers with mismatched experience all the time - with a couple of guiding principles:
- I strongly prefer candidates who have experience in at least two languages. If they’ve learned two, I can pay them learn the one I need.
- As you mentioned, total years of experience counts more than most other factors. I can’t hire a junior who knows 4 languages when the role I need as an experienced lead.
- But I’ll take a risk on a promising junior when I need a senior (guess how many senior devs are actively looking for work on an average day… I’m not a choosy beggar.)
- For senior and above, I’m looking for evidence of experience with the underlying principles for the roles I need filled (back-end, front-end, security, identity, DevOps, test frameworks, etc.)
Oh and, please do apply. If you make a good impression and aren’t the team member I need next, I might know someone who does. You want to always be networking.
And any manager who makes you feel bad for applying for a mismatched job is an asshole and trust me, that person’s peers (like me) are aware of it and it is limiting their career progress. I just don’t like them enough to even tell them so.
Edit: Answering a question below, my team is fully remote, though we have do have limitations around country citizenship for certain roles.