Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even co wider people with my own qualifications.

I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least bachelor’s degrees in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.

You can probably guess how that went.

There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.

I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.

Friend of mine applied for a job where they asked for at least 5 years of experience with Angular version x.y.z (can’t remember the exact version). The friend responded that he had 10 years of experience with versions x-3 to x+1.

The HR person doing the hiring asked back “But do you have 5 years of experience with the exact version x.y.z?” to which he answered “Version x.y.z has only been out for 3 years so it’s impossible to have 5 years of experience with it.” HR wrote back saying that he was rejected because he didn’t have 5 years of experience of experience with that exact version.

Letting HR make such decisions is already ridiculous, because they would have no clue what even working with version x.y.z means. For them it might sound like that you have experience working with win11, but they need somebody that knows win98.