Comment by Vegenoid

I feel like the sentiment of “we can train a competent dev in our language and stack” has given way to “we want a dev with proven experience in our language/stack” over the last few years. I suspect this has something to do with more non-technical staff being put in between candidates and the engineers they’ll be working with during the hiring process. These non-technical staff rely on “x years of experience in thing” to know if a person might be competent at that thing.

I think that this is one of the reasons networking is becoming more and more important, because it lets a candidate demonstrate their generally-applicable development skills to a fellow engineer who is capable of making qualitative engineering judgements.