Comment by com2kid
21 hours ago
I interviewed a developer once who was super junior on paper but had a side project of a fully featured desktop anime episode to watch/watched tracker with lots of library feature features.
Hire.
Interviewed another Dev who made arcade sticks as a side project.
Hired.
You can't teach passion. Hire all that passionate people you can. Tech stacks are irrelevant compared to the love of building things.
Also a great filter from the other side.
I was not hired once because I didn't have React experience, despite having years of both Vue and Angular and having led teams building non-trivial apps in both. IME focusing on such a minor detail like that means either a) you're going to be so pressured to get stuff out of the door they can't handle slightly lower productivity for a month while you learn the different syntax, and/or b) the person hiring you isn't technical enough to know this is a minor detail.
Either way, better off somewhere else :)
I actually quite like it when this happens from the candidate side of the table. I don't want to work anywhere that is so short term focused on "you need to have X years of experience with this exact language/framework or we won't even consider you." It saves us both a lot of time by realizing our values are clearly not aligned early on in the process.
I landed my first software job when I was 18 years old. I didn't have a degree or any professional experience in their tech stack, and the recruiter told me later that I was hired because of "my passion for Legos and foreign languages" (I was learning Swahili at the time, and one of my interviewers happened to be a former volunteer in the Peace Corps, who conducted most of the interview in Swahili).
I had a great experience at that company while I was in college, which also launched me into an exciting professional career. All of it wouldn't have happened without people like you.