> especially when random company HR wants 10 years of NodeJs and its been around for 2 years.
My bane!
I swear. I've been doing some form of programming since I was a kid, and as a hobby and moonlighting for more like 10 years, and professionally for a notable company for a few years and I still get automatic responses (* rejections) from HR within hours or a couple of days with 99% of the applications I send out with a generic message full of platitudes. And from any size: small startups to multi-national conglomerates. If I hear anything at all.
Thankfully, my current place did exactly the opposite. They stated what technologies they used, and had a distinct understanding that you would not know their inhouse app.
They also wanted to see your experience. So the first thing they do before an interview is a audition. You're sat down, on prem, (sys ad job) with Windows 2012 server, IIS, MSSQL, and a toy app. You have to make it work. They record the screencap, and review it as a team to see how you perform the job.
Frankly, I love how this place works and gets things done. Roadblocks are a thing, like all jobs.. But some of these are from those much higher up. But communication and support of your coworkers is absolutely amazing.
But the other thing, I work now in a regulated space. I knew that going in (3 good friends work there as well). Lying on my resume would not be, uhh, good :) There's these nice guys and ladys in suits who specialize in a wee more stringent background checks.
That's an interesting approach. I also don't mind the idea of a take-home project if it's not, say 6+ hours. The performance anxiety that can set in when someone is peering over your shoulder or going to review your recording later could be a bit of a handicap for some. Still, it's a fresh, and more realistic take.
My problem has been getting past the gatekeepers to get to that point—any face-to-face.
Though in my current role, I'll say they were happy after speaking to me and discovering I had heard and was familiar enough with their solution to have fiddled around with the platform outside of a professional context. In spite of my amateur knowledge of it, it seemed to be the distinguishing factor in my interview... just not until I actually got past the gatekeepers— in what increasingly seems like a game of chance! :P
I think it's absolutely OK to lie until you get to the in-person interviews where there's less emphasis on buzz keywords and more focus on your actual skills.
On the other hand, not checking 100% of the boxes would boost the credibility of your other claims a lot. Clever HR departments might even deliberately add some extremely implausible optional requirements to flag those who are most comfortable lying in their CV.
This. The take-away is that job descriptions are a poor indicator of the skills required by the company. This is why networking and referrals are so valuable, since they let you understand what the work _actually_ is.
Do not treat the years of experience as a barrier to entry.
There is already an information asymmetry, what's wrong with using it to your advantage? Employers do, through withholding salary data during the entirety of your employment -- from initial negotiations, to annual raises/compensation re-evaluation, to performance and retention bonuses, to etc.
Beyond disqualifying yourself, there's not much in terms of risk and the reward (getting your career off the ground) is quite good, especially when faced with writing >200 job applications.
Perhaps lying to get past the know-nothings in HR is acceptable. Probably not a good idea to lie to tech people you would work with.