I'm a "junior developer" (and first time poster!) who is about to graduate with a degree in CS and have a little over a year's worth of internship experience bo

I'm a "junior developer" (and first time poster!) who is about to graduate with a degree in CS and have a little over a year's worth of internship experience both at a medium/large (1500-2000 employees at HQ) and small/startup (~70 employees) sized company. As I apply to a number of companies I'm interested in working for it still surprises me that the majority of these listings for dev's are asking for 3+ years or 5+ years experience. Now I completely and whole-heartedly agree that if the job description mentioned something ridiculous (we need you to create custom SOAP requests using haskell) then perhaps the experience is merited. But when I actually reach out to the companies asking for 3+ years experience and ask what they're trying to accomplish in the immediate future, where they need additional developers (i.e. what team is this for), etc. I'm surprised to hear it's nothing unusual. There might be the need to occasionally do packet inspection (or something else semi-uncommon) for debugging or what have you but is this really beyond me and my peers? It might be beyond some, and while I can't speak for all the junior dev's out there, I personally am comfortable enough to do this on my own. Now please correct me if I'm wrong but basically it comes down to this: if I were the hiring manager I wouldn't focus so much on the number of years the dev has but rather if that dev "still has it" (if they're older/more experienced). By "still has it" I mean a genuine passion for writing solid code and being humble enough to know when they're wrong and changing their behavior. If it's a younger dev maybe it's best to focus on trying to determine if they have a genuine interest in becoming a better programmer and a real thirst for knowledge/love to learn (in-line with the article). My only gripe with the latter point are how some of these companies are filtering but that's entirely their choice.