My experience has been that it's the big crufty old school enterprise companies that insist on specialists. They obsess over your resume having certain keywords

My experience has been that it's the big crufty old school enterprise companies that insist on specialists. They obsess over your resume having certain keywords or "N years of X". The Silicon Valley tech companies mostly don't seem to care about this. Actually, the SV tech companies do want a particular kind of specialist - Leetcode Masters. As long as you can regurgitate algorithms while putting on a show as if you discovered the solution serendipitously at the whiteboard, you're golden regardless of whether you have 20 years of experience in Rust or whether your previous job was serving tables as a waiter. In fact, going along with the theme of this original article, some tech companies have a pipeline for "nontraditional applicants", so I feel in some sense, it can actually be advantageous to be a former waiter whose spent time mastering leetcode vs. an industry veteran with many years of experience at the "wrong companies".