Do I really need X years of experience? How to read a software engineering job description

James S. Fisher
Job Advice for Software Engineers
6 min readDec 31, 2018

--

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.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

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 engineering managers got together with one of the recruiting/talent people and created a well-formed job description, combining the needs of the engineering manager with the what-is-our-mission fluff from the recruiter/talent person. Someone from HR did a review, then a final check was done (hopefully) by the eng manager for technical correctness.

Once finalized, one of the aforementioned people pressed a button to publish the listing somewhere, or copied and pasted it. Applicant tracking systems (ATSes) like Greenhouse and Lever and Jobvite have built-in listing-management systems and often republish the job to other job systems, like Indeed and Monster, which republish the job elsewhere. Maybe the engineering manager went an extra mile and manually entered the job into a job board they prefer, like Hacker News “Who’s Hiring” threads or cool online communities.

--

--

James S. Fisher
Job Advice for Software Engineers

Software engineer, manager, and executive in San Francisco, CA. Over 12 years in Silicon Valley tech.