Have deep experience in 3 different job fields and, in 2 years, learn 5 languages.
“We want a senior developer at junior pay.”
I forget what the exact quote is, but…
Wanted, candidate with:
The wisdom of a 50 year old. The experience of a 40 year old. The drive of a 30 year old. The pay of a 20 year old."Our rockstar developer quit, because they had to fulfill too many roles and you get to be their replacement
…at junior pay."
rockstar
developer
1 Year and many poor design decisions later: “Why is our app so slow??”
We had a great product, then we axed the great staff. Of course, we sold the company before the product went to shit.
Most people don’t realise this but it says “what we’re looking for” not “our minimum requirements”. And even when they do say they are minimum requirements, they aren’t really.
Whoever gets this job is absolutely not going to have all this. You can still apply.
That said it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable. I have used all those languages and have at least medium understanding of them (haven’t written any Go or Java for a while).
I’ve used MySQL and Postgresql, and Mongo mercifully briefly.
I’ve used some of the AWS stuff. Enough to bullshit about the rest.
I haven’t ever really designed a fault tolerant scalable system but I could definitely bullshit about it.
You don’t need to get 100%.
Bullshit rarely passes technical interviews at places with low turnover.
I’ve done some cloud stuff on AWS and GCP and thought I knew enough to pass interviews, then they started asking me about stuff I hadn’t even heard of anywhere I’d worked.
Started a new job 3 months ago, 80% of our stack/frameworks are technologies I’ve never heard of before. Tekton, Firestore, Cypress, 42Crunch, Conformance, Cloud Functions (I think that’s just GCP Lambda), some front end testing frameworks I don’t know (more of a backend guy though I know raw JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, and CSS really well from back in the day), Hoppscotch instead of Postman for some reason… and other stuff I’m forgetting now.
I thought because I’d written applications that ran in a cloud environment and understood Jenkins, I was all set. Nope. 28 years I’ve been doing this and I still feel like a newbie outside of the Java web services ecosystem. And it doesn’t matter how good I am in that arena because the code is shit almost beyond repair. Half of our tools are flat out being lied to. Our endpoints are written to detect our testing frameworks and just respond with 200 and a blank payload. Our Swagger is useless because everything returns Result<?> so you can’t see the DTOs because 42Crunch gives like 600+ errors because of how garbage the API is written…
Man, I drifted there. Point is, you need to know enough to get the job in order to bullshit your way into it.
My secret? I’m in a high turnover position in the Midwest market (not competing with the glut of tech workers in major hubs, nor drawing their kind of pay) and the technical interview was pretty laughable. Now I have to try to prove myself and get hired in as a full employee rather than contractor. Then I’ll have some job security and maybe a path forward that isn’t just keep taking Sr. Dev, Team Lead contracts.
Yeah AWS has so many solutions, when quizzed about a tool I haven’t used, I honestly say “can you describe it’s use? I’ve built a lot in AWS/gcp/azure but haven’t used that tool. I’ll describe how I’d do it with tools I’m familiar with”. Normally goes over well.
For example, if they really wanted amplify experience for some reason, and I would instead describe how I’d set things up with ec2 / ecs / fargate, etc.
Yeah but these show up somehow at some point in the tech interviews rounds and if you fumble to strengthen your experiences you will get rejected
Be familiar with NoSql: like Mysql, postgreSQL, SequelSqlSQL, and Memdb.
Be fluent in 5 programming languages, 3 spoken languages, and be able to read Linear A, B, and C.
Reminds me of when I was first out of school, and seeing jobs for C#.NET that needed 5 years of experience back when the entire platform was 3 years old.
Be familiar with NoSql: like Mysql, postgreSQL, SequelSqlSQL, and Memdb.
well, the definition of “NoSQL” was changed to stand for “Not Only SQL” some while back because of how many nosql DBs started incorporating SQL (and how many SQL RDBMS started adding nosql features)
NoSQL was only ever a marketing term. Things like Mongo are what’s been known as KVSes (
Key-Value Stores). Mongo basically just rode a hype wave into extremely large amounts of funding but predating it by at least a decade was libmemcached, which lacks the “relational light” functionality that Mongo added but is a more resilient version of the core concept.Technologies like Redis actually ended up adding significant innovation but they ended up mostly eschewing the NoSQL term anyway.
Hah! Of course it is, I didn’t know that but words stopped meaning anything in tech ages ago and reality is finally catching up. Makes sense though, Azure and AWS both are webs of different data stores and interconnections now.
You must know double Java.
Amazing, i didn’t even notice this.
No, that’s in order. You must know those languages in that order, sort of like a russian nesting doll of experience.
Java++
Salary: $65k/yr
No remote work, location: Bay Area.
Yearly bonus: $5 coupon for McDonald’s
Valid only in Altoona, PA.
I’m currently looking for work in this area and I have seen very similar postings, 3 years experience and for £25000 to £29000.
It’s bloody mental, and they list it as junior roles and then list everything.
Fuuuuck that
This is what happens when the lead sends hr “here’s everything I care about and need on my team. A junior to intermediate candidate should be familiar with all, and experienced with one or two.”
Then hr says “yep sure, expert in all”
The most accurate take. I honestly agree with most of the people here saying this isn’t unreasonable when these aren’t requirements meant to be met at 100%. But honestly they are written so poorly and reed like you need all of them. You hit the nail on the head. Bad requirements sent to the dev lead, unclear details about what kind of candidates can fill the role, and poorly written job requirements.
Any random crud app will have you tick almost all those boxes. What’s the problem?
They didn’t say ‘in exactly 2 years’, if you have that experience gathered on the course of 20 years, that’s still ‘2+ years of experience’ 🌚
