Do you make it clear that you will only accept candidates with strictly .NET experience? I've had plenty of reasonably positive experiences applying to places where I have the overall skill set (front-end or back-end) but do not have the exact tech stack the company uses as my strongest set of hard skills.

Both companies and applicants dance way out-of-step with each other on this.

Companies list 10 things as "requirements" but are willing to hire candidates without all of them. To me, requirement means must-have, but what do I know? Candidates know that companies are not serious about the requirements, so they ignore them and apply. But, some of the requirements are "must have" from the point of view of the company, but they never say it. And sometimes even if they say "Experience in obscure XyZ framework is a must!" they still may bend the rules if John Carmack-like talent applies. It's such a mess.

>Both companies and applicants dance way out-of-step with each other on this.

100% agree with this. The previous commenter's company probably does want exactly those things, but as you said, some other companies have HR write the job postings and it is just a game of telephone with what the hiring team actually needs.

So they only way to find out is to apply, especially if you are currently unemployed you don't want to risk something just because you don't 100% line up to the position.

I'm curious why you wouldn't consider those people just because their existing experience doesn't 100% overlap your tech stack? Could they not be trained on how to write backend .net? Wouldn't the diversity of experience be helpful for your team?

Yep they could but companies usually don't do it.

I've done it. OOP is OOP, there are only different flavors.

I wonder to what extent an OOP person would be able to do a Haskell job (or a similar functional language).

Anyone can learn a language. The .Net framework and the related ecosystem is huge. I’ve done front end work maybe a decade ago, I still do backend JavaScript and I know the basics of web technologies. But anyone would be a fool to hire me if they wanted a front end developer.

Even if I knew Java that doesn’t mean I could just jump in and start doing Android development.

I remember jumping in and doing Spring Boot. I knew Java. It went well, it helped that I knew about NodeJS and Django.

Man, I have backend-specific experience with .NET and all I can find are job postings for frontend, Python, and node. Where are your job postings?