[MichaelCrawford]

Have a look at the ads wanting several years of experience coding in Swift.

(Apple has only supported it for about three months now.)

When MS first shipped C++ for windows, quite commonly the recruiters wanted candidates with five years of windows C++ experience.

[cratermoon]

That sort of thing seems to happen when the folks writing the job posting attempt to take the actual requirements from the hiring manager and rewrite them to some standard format. A manager might want "someone who knows C++ for Windows" and "someone who is intermediate in experience". The HR person will look up "intermediate" and see "minimum 5 years" and then glue it onto the technology.

Has anyone ever had a favorable experience working with a hiring company or recruiter that is especially particular about how many years of experience a candidate has in some technology? Exactly how much a programmers knows isn't directly dependent on how long the programmer has been working with the tool. There is such a thing as "1 year of experience 5 times".