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Do I really need X years of experience? How to read a software engineering job description
You’re browsing your favorite job board and find a Software Engineer position open at your dream company, but the requirements list 5 years of Ruby experience, but you’re a Python programmer. “Oh no!” you think. “I don’t qualify!” But the reality is you probably do.
What exactly is a job listing, and how does it work?
Job listings, also sometimes referred to as job descriptions or job requisition, are documents stating that a company is willing to hire someone for a designated role. For software engineers, the title of the role can also be called developer or programmer, or qualified with a specialty such as front-end engineer or data engineer. Regardless of what it’s said, the company has signaled that they are ready to hire a person who can write code, has a certain degree of specialization in an area that they need, and who can fit their interview criteria.
Let’s start with how a job listing gets created. At the beginning of the last quarter or planning period, the decision-makers for an organization or department at a growing company had a meeting. They calculated a budget and decided how many more people they want to add (a “headcount increase”) by the end of the current planning period. Then one of the…
