The tech list you describe usually is handled by a whole team (or multiple teams), not by a single Jack-of-all-trades person. For that amount of learning material you must be a superhuman to retain that knowledge. Here comes the other problem: unless you are working on that tech stack actively, you cannot remember it all. You may learn it for a certain period of time, but will eventually forget it in a while. Even if you successfully manage to keep that info “fresh” in your mind, the hype train moves so fast that “the new cool thing” will render your knowledge obsolete. You learned Docker? Sorry, the world is moving to WASM containers now.
Learn fundamentals. Learn only things based on YOUR needs. The interviewing process is broken. You cannot “hack” it by doing everything they require.
Or: learn a laundry list of tech only to realise the company requiring them uses Angular 0.5 and some nightmarish practices. I remember top engineer in a high profile company saying how he would not pass the current hiring process.
P.S.: My company is looking for experienced Deno developer, min 5 years of production experience. Unpaid internship position.
Having gone through interviews for 100+ employee companies, I was expected to know it all. Haven’t done SQL in years? Got nailed. 10+ years of JS experience but barely any in React? Got nailed. Haven’t reviewed that one algorithm used in the interview? Got nailed. That’s just a few examples.
Interviews aren’t totally reflective of the job but one‘s got to pass the interview before getting to the job.
I believe lying to some degree must be done in order to meet the challenge of the modern tech job posting. Interviews do not reflect reality. I think we just need to demonstrate competency of core concepts, get the job, and then rise to the occasion as fast as possible.
If an industry demands the impossible, let's pretend we can do the impossible as well, and let reality be somewhere in-between the two. Being honest here only allows for the dishonest to succeed, so let's join them in mass self-deception.
This only works if you're ready to "download" the information you need once you're given the job though!
Bingo to this. The sad part of the engineering world is that most companies are looking for that unicorn developer that just so happens to have used their exact tech stack. Oh and they also need to be able to optimally solve CS problems on the spot in a high pressure, time crunch situation.
So anecdote time. This is my one experience talking to management all the way up to the core "founding" members of a company I worked at once. They were trying to hire rapidly during a heavy scaling period of the company. However, the skill set they needed (actually required in this case) to run their new locations was indeed looking for unicorns. These people existed (I was one of them), but the ones they managed to find who also passed their interview process declined offers. I understood why - the market had shifted a lot and even with a subset of the required skills, these people could find higher paying, less stressful work. The value prop of the potential options also had significantly fallen.
I had multiple conversations where I brought this up, yet for some reason, those in the founding group simply did not believe me. Who would turn down the chance to work at a hot startup? They had joined for far less and during far more stressful conditions. What's being offered now should be more than enough, right?
I came away from those meetings and that company learning that some founders don't realize that unicorns, like themselves, are often the type to do exactly what you said rather than join them.
Deno is something in javascript-land that just popped up (I'm not sure what exactly what it is, since I haven't keep up about JS ecosystem since friday and everything has changed), so yeah it's a joke that they require 5 years of experience in it.
IIRC Deno is a new JS runtime built by the creator of Node and written in Rust that pledges to resolve some of the hairier issues with Node. It’s actually one of the JS projects I’m most looking forward to maturing.
P.S.: My company is looking for experienced Deno developer, min 5 years of production experience. Unpaid internship position.