It's always been that way. HR people have no clue about what it takes to create good software, so they hit checkboxes. I remember seeing a job posting in 97 listing required 5 years experience in Java. Neat trick seeing as Java came out in 95.

These terms are not trivial. Programming is becoming more complex so that while you may understand the concepts, different languages and frameworks can also have different tools and IDEs and ecosystems to pull snippets from. Companies are used to getting exactly what they want and they'd rather not wait even 2 weeks getting someone up to speed with the ecosystem before they spend 6 weeks getting them up to speed with the code base.

Also... They love impossible requirements so they can claim they meet H1B visa requirements.

Well said. Gone are the golden days of fly-by-your-pants coding where you'd simply binge on coffee and disconnect the phone until you had a functioning program and an understanding of what you are doing. Now you have to have the right credentials from a school you cant really afford to do something you dont really care about for a corporation that doesnt care about you and repeat constantly, until death or liberation.

Programming jobs have changed, HR and Management use marketing terms because they don't understand how programming works or what programming concepts are.

They auto-reject people based on resumes using AI programs to read in Word documents and index them. Those who meet the strict requirements and keywords get the interviews and are asked to build a sample app in one hour that does something like messaging in Java using frameworks and OOP and best practices. When they fail to hire someone they go for H1B Visa quotas.

You find some stuff like 5+ years of Visual C# 2015 as a requirement, it is insane.

Buzzwords. The people who don't understand how things work think that you're some kind of god if you present more of them than anybody else.

It is part of the "rock star programmer" appeal of the profession. Programmers have been in such high demand for so long, it has attracted a lot of inexperienced folks who want to get a foot in the door. If you want to be a literal rock star, you have to already know how to play your instrument, you can't go in all like "Well I studied music theory for three years and I've been playing the guitar for 3 months" and expect to get recognition for your knowledge. You can't want to be a rock star, you have to simply be a rock star, and of course some people are better at assuming this attitude than others. You can't be willing to learn a new framework on the job, you have to know the framework, even if that just means you've been reading a bunch of blogs can make smart remarks about the latest beta features - "I am really looking forward to dynamic threading in the next release, it is going to make things so much easier!"

Also I find it strange that people now place an emphasis on the difference between OOP and procedural programming. They are orthogonal to each other. Declarative versus procedural is more meaningful.

Just about every "startup" ever.

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Personally, i couldn't care less what something is programmed in. If it runs and does the job it's intended to do... fair game. Alot of experienced programmers can maintain a codebase in a language they've never even learned, all it takes is logic and hacks until you become familiar with it. But hey, that's unprofessional -- can't be unprofessional now can we, better go put on my suit and sit down for a nice plate of node.js.

Yeah no while the generlized skills transfer there can be significant differences between languages. Differences which can take weeks or even months to become aclimated with. Weeks and months that can be very expensive for a business. A new employee is already a monetary risk. A new employee that does not actually have the skills you are looking for but has some very similar skills. Thats a more significant monetary risk. Its perfectly understandable that they dont want to waste all that money for you to learn a new language on their bill.

Or how about when they don't advertise a job as programming, but you end up doing it anyway?

I'm not a programmer, I'm a Business Analyst, but holy shit - I need to take "SharePoint" off my resume. Sure - I can make a basic HTML/CSS page, but stop asking me to make your departmental website in Java. You don't need that.

But of course, the boss-man wants something flashy to show his director.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm almost one. I can hack up quick sketches for my Arduino and that's good enough for me.

Programming in high level languages seems to be the issue for me. One of the most relentlessly intelligent programmers I've ever known specializes in embedded systems and is often hired to write in assembly.

For any higher level position I disagree, the specificity is logical:

These days you are hiring into a position the person is probably stuck in for the duration of the 3-5 years they are going to be at your company and you are going to be paying the rate that is their current salary plus whatever increases they didn't get at their last gig.

You can hire someone that works in the toolchain you work in, save on costs because their time getting up to speed is lower, and they are more likely to write something your existing developers are going to follow, or you can hire someone with a solid background, spend time teaching them, and lose time when your other developers encounter their early attempts which look like their last framework's top ideas ported crudely to the toolchain you use.

You get to keep the person about the same time either way, but the second situation gives you less return on investment, and there are plenty of candidates to choose from so why not make the selection that gives you more results for similar expense?

On top of that, some of the concepts, while possible to implement in various languages are very much the wrong way to do something in certain languages for low level technical reasons. It started with the C vs C++ crowds, spread into the various flavors then outward into new languages as they developed with the various compilers/runtimes being built with different assumptions.

I know what a binary tree, hash table, linked list and event handler look like in many languages, I have implemented them in many, but I also have many years of experience on when to avoid them like the plague in my chosen language and enough sense to know that even if I learned a new language to the point I was fluent in it I couldn't legitimately demand the same pay as I can in the language I have more than a decade of experience in.

What I do see is in the lower tier of dev jobs they are posted the same way as the more senior jobs. This I agree is a probably a bit unnecessary as almost all Jr candidates are useless right off of school, but the market isn't tight enough to post even Jr positions as no experience needed, and if you are going to ask for experience you might as well ask for related experience as those candidates are out there.

The other factor at play in the REALLY specific job postings is large organization politics, or god forbid: unions. If a manager's grade is determined by the number of staff they manage keeping an open position open lets the manager keep their position and meet budget sometimes. Other times having a position that cannot be filled provides the justification to bring the rest of the department's rate up to market levels.

Companies with union dictated hiring rules are the only companies I have ever observed actually "unable" to fill a position due to the checklists, and even that isn't that common, but we did have a couple local employers that would post things like Level X platform Y developer with Z years experience where Z was 3x the number of years Y had existed. I applied for some of those initially our of school assuming it was a mistake only to find our from the hiring manager that all employees at level X require Z years of experience since their last collective bargaining with the mechanical and electrical unions. I had no relationship with the union so I could only respond that I had worked in that platform since z/3 years ago when it was initially released and the hiring manager apologized for wasting everyone's time.

That position remained posted until the company closed all of the local locations and reopened several states away with no union the year before Z years would have actually been possible.

I am sure there are people playing games with it for H1B purposes as well, but at least in the geographic area I work in, most companies that were going to try that route already did, many learned their lessons and are already pulling back from it. From what I have seen, the level of fraud in the overseas universities and technical schools is going to solve the H1B problem faster than legislation will everywhere except for possibly the west coast.

I agree. It is very annoying. My personal theory is that recruiters are laze and instead of trying to figure out if you know programming or not, they just count how many libraries you have used in your projects. People are collecting libraries like they are stamps. They are also following libraries like they are fashion trends.