Experience With Similar Technologies: Convincing HR People?

Question

Let's say that a job posting asks for experience in technology X. You have no experience in X but you do have experience in technology Y, which you're convinced is similar enough that the learning curve to be productive in X would be extremely short. How do you get hiring people, especially HR people without much technical background, to look past your lack of experience in X and take you seriously?

Examples:

• You're applying for a Java job and have never used Java except for some very small toy projects. However, you do have substantial experience in C#, which is clearly derivative of Java and promotes the same style of programming (class-based OO, static typing, autoboxing, etc.)

• You're applying for a C job. You've never worked on anything written in straight C, but you have done substantial work in C++ and used the C-like subset (raw pointers, malloc/free memory management, void* pointers, etc.) for some of the low-level parts of the project.

• You're applying for a C++ job and you've done extensive work in D. D is intended to be a reengineering of C++ and includes the key concepts like RAII, templates, the ability to manage memory manually and do low-level work, etc. Furthermore, you're aware of exactly where the differences lie from extensive discussions on language design in the D community.

Edit: I guess my more fundamental question that inspired this post is, "Why do most job ads place so much emphasis on specific technologies (which aren't hard to learn on the fly if you grasp the underlying concepts) instead of fundamental language-agnostic skills?" If I were running a language X shop, I'd much rather hire a top notch programmer regardless of specific technologies and assume he'd pick up X pretty fast than hire an expert in X who had mediocre fundamental, language-agnostic programming skills.

Answer 1

• I'm sympathetic to your plight. I agree that some technologies are very easy to learn, and it's frustrating when an HR department doesn't understand that.

• To understand a bit better, you should understand the psychology and politics behind job descriptions. A job description, although occasionally well thought-out and well-written, is more often cobbled together at the last minute by a manager with other things to do. Writing a job description is hard, takes time, and doesn't appear to have a direct impact on the company's bottom line. So it's easy to get away with writing a bad job description. In general, this means that a manager will hack out a simple description listing (what else?) technologies in use at the shop! It's really easy to say "Hmmm.... What language do we use here? C#? Ok, job description: proficient in C#!". Then you hand it off to HR and they solicit and review resumes. And no, they do NOT understand that C# is very similar to Java.

• In my own experience, I tried to handle this by writing job descriptions like this: "Required skills: Proficiency with at least one static language (Java, C#, C++, etc.); Proficiency with at least one dynamic language (Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.)."

• Otherwise, try to sneak your way into the job by showing that you've got a bunch of other relevant skills. Industry experience, or technical domain specialization. For instance, I got a job at a .NET shop even though I have no .NET experience. I do, however, have GUI test automation experience, which is what they wanted to invest in. So voila! I'm in!

Answer 2

Short answer, I don't think you can. If the HR people have not been told by someone internally that candidates with some experience set are acceptable they won't care. If they're looking for C# developers and you have tons of Java experience they won't know they are similar, and won't care what you tell them.

Answer 3

some languages you can get away with not knowing the exact language, java.c# is pretty close. C/C++ are different worlds despite c++ being a super set of C.

Answer 4

Language is not only a syntax.
It's also huge set of libraries, standard and popular non-standard, it's a platform which targets this language - CLR/JVM/Win32/POSIX/etc.
So when you migrate to another language (or another platform with same language), you should spent some months to learn new libraries, API, platform quirks, best practices and other things required to become average developer for this language\platform.
And of course at beginning you will use practices from old language, which can be inappropriate in new one.

Answer 5

• List your domain knowledge (health-care, insurance, gaming etc) appropriate to the position in question. Point is, do not make the language prominent.
• Instead of saying "6+ years experience in X language", say, "6+ years experience in web-development(gaming or whatever)".
• In the 'languages known', list both the languages - language that you know well and the language for which position has been advertised.

I did not try such a thing and I don't know if this will work. If the HR only cares of the number of years and the language, you have it on your resume.

If you can get past the HR filter with this, you'll have the bigger task of convincing the technical interviewers that you can get things done in the language that they want.