[groby_b]

Any decent programmer I know is perfectly fine with switching OSs - if you know .NET and Windows, learning Unix will slow you down for a few weeks, but that's it.

"Work experience" is rather overrated. Critical thinking skills are what matters for the job, and those are in awfully short supply. Rejecting a candidate who possesses them because they don't have the right keyword on the resume is...

Wait. On second thought, keep doing that. Because that means I can hire them. :)

[kag0]

I agree that rejecting people for lack of a keyword is a silly practice. But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good. I know a lot of devs who I consider to be at least decent and switching os, stack, paradigms, everything would trip them up for more than a few weeks in the best case. In a lot of reasonable cases people have a preference what tools that use, that's why there's a "Ruby way of doing things" and a "python way of doing things" and a "go way of doing things".

[groby_b]

> But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good.

That may well be. The question for the hiring process then becomes, how do we distinguish between people who lack keywords but could adapt, and people who lack keywords and can't. (Alas, the keywords don't solve anything - because I've interviewed quite a few people with all the right keywords whom I wouldn't consider decent programmers at all)

Programming is one of the disciplines that suffers from the fact that the initial skills hurdle is very low, but the mountain of knowledge is high. And constantly shifting. What we all want, ideally, are people who can navigate the shifting landscape easily. I'm not sure resumes easily give us that. (Unless it's a reasonable long career. If you've got 30 years of adapting to new tech, it's easy to infer you'll probably learn the next one, too. If you've got 3 years, nobody can tell)