Frustrated by “Years of Exp.” Question After Resume–Am I Overreacting?

Question

I was recently approached by a startup founder for a Senior Flutter Engineer role via email. I expressed interest and shared my resume with them. My resume shows that I have been in the industry since 2017.The next email asks "How many years of experience do you have working with Flutter only?". Doesn&rsquo;t the question show that the founder knows absolutely nothing about software development. I am furious at this question. Am I over-reacting?I find this metric to be severely outdated and not reflective of software development skills at all for reasons such as the non-linear nature of skill acquisition and the rate at which technology evolves. Especially for a newer framework like Flutter.

joezydeco · Accepted Answer

Because he's seen a ton of resumes that say Flutter experience, and when he digs in he sees that people have written a Hello World or tinkered with a few example pieces of code in a senior class project. Or they watched a Google I/O presentation on YouTube.
Asking how many years you've actually spent with a framework is a valid question, and you're going to get it again. So look inward. Do you really have 6 years of actual experience shipping apps with it? Or is it 2 or 3? Maybe one? Have you shipped at all?
And if you have shipped a Flutter app, pivot the conversation to that instead. Point out what you did. And then it doesn't matter how many years you did (or didn't) spend on it because you're giving the the interviewer what he is looking for. What's that Spolsky tag line? Smart and Gets Things Done(tm)

eschneider · Answer

Don't take it personally. A lot of companies (and especially a lot of startups) don't have a lot of experience hiring/managing people and is sorta shows.

syndicatedjelly · Answer

It's reasonable to ask, because they can already tell that you have 6 years of general software experience. Maybe they need someone who has shipped products in a particular framework. I'm sure you would agree that there is a difference between someone who has 6 months of experience doing something, versus 3 years and versus 10 years. Would you hire a musician who has 6 months of experience playing an instrument and just hope that they can learn enough to play professionally, on your dime? If they don't happen to pan out, it's the hiring manager's ass on the line (and in this case the entire company)Apply, hope for the best, and move on if it doesn't work out.