[ryanianian]

I like your way of putting it, but I think those concepts (RAII etc) are fairly easily learned by a competent developer in any language. Most languages have analogous concepts if you use them long enough.

A shop that says it requires years of experience in a particular language is probably making their own hiring situation more difficult than they need to.

C++ for example is definitely a sharp language that takes some time to adjust to, and experience in C will help.

However: I think any competent programmer with a few years of experience would be able to gain basic proficiency in a month or two and probably daily-level-mastery in 6-12 months.

I say this as someone who had 10+ years in Java and only passive experience in C. I've managed to become mostly proficient in C++14 in about a month of full-time learning. After 10+ years of programming, I can pretty quickly adapt to the C++ way of thinking about things. I don't think I'm alone in this style of learning a language, and many hiring teams seem to agree.