I don’t have much comment directly on this topic, though for lower-tier jobs not requiring a lot of hard-won domain-specific experience I think it is true.

However, one of the commenters got me thinking about how often employers in IT search for a specific set of skills, so much so that it is truly unreasonable.

For instance, a few months ago I saw a job post on a site about how the company was looking for someone with a VMWare Certified Professional 5 certification, and that those with only VCP 4 certification would not be considered (or wording to that effect).

I am an expert in VMWare ESXi from version 4 to 5.5. There is nothing that I can’t do with that product range. I know nearly everything there is to know about it. Without exaggeration or bragging, out of IT people who work with it, I’m probably in the top one percent (one of the few products I can say that about as I tend to be a generalist in most areas and am probably rarely even in the top 30 percent or above).

Yet I only have a VCP 4 certification at the moment, and hadn’t planned on getting my cert for 5.

And the reason is that VMWare ESXi version 4 and 5 really aren’t all that different. You could explain the differences to an eight-year-old in about 15 minutes. The average IT worker could learn them in 30 seconds.

I glanced at a chart for 5-6 seconds and knew all of them.

For those not in the techie world, it’d be like adding a few commas to a book and telling someone they had to read it again as they knew nothing about it and actually hadn’t even read it, even though they’d just finished it the day before.

That’s how stupid that job ad is.

I can’t really explain it, as that can’t be blamed on HR which is my usual bugaboo. No, some techie who should know better had to write something that specific and inane.

I’m not surprised that employers hurt potential employees with ridiculous requirements that make no real-world sense. That’s just the way of the world now. What does surprise me is that employers hurt themselves at the same time, without seeming to understand it at all.