I wrote this in response to the commonly-stated requirements in job board posts, as well as emailed inquiries from recruiters, that demand specific numbers of y

I wrote this in response to the commonly-stated requirements in job board posts, as well as emailed inquiries from recruiters, that demand specific numbers of years for the technologies that are expected to be applied to the given job. Rather more important than having five years experience with Java, say, is to know how to write Java code that works well, that implements products your users enjoy, that gets good reviews from the trade press, that sells well, and is maintainable not just by those who come after you, but by you yourself, at a later time. In my own experience it is quite uncommon for not just interviewers, but actual hiring managers, to ask me what I have actually accomplished. They seem to assume that anyone with a certain number of years with a technology, will be good enough to get the job done. I myself have no problem shipping products using technologies that I have no clue about when hired. Similarly, there are some technologies that I have lots of experience with, that continue to stymie me, such as regular expressions.