> Suddenly the job ads were "Android Dev. Must have 3 years experience".

So just read up on it and say you do. They don't really need 3 years experience, so you don't really need to have it.

Employers check your work history. You'd better be able to back up having the amount of experience they require with paid, value-delivering work at past employers, or they'll pass.

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aworks 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was an engineering manager an for decades and I did first technical phone screening of a very large number of candidates. I couldn't really assess someone's design and programming skills. So I would pick a particular area they were promoting and go as deep as I could on it, both on the technology and their project experience using it. I weeded out lots of candidates, saving my engineers' interview time for more suitable candidates. And my teams were good at giving me feedback when I let someone unqualified e slip through...

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Many actually do not check anything.

	▲	bitwize 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I've never actually encountered one who didn't. Just like I've never been able to actually quit on Tuesday and walk into my next role on Thursday the way Hackernews told me "any halfway decent developer" should be able to do. They tend to ask about this sort of thing in interviews too and if you prove not to have the required background, you are considered weak and filtered out. Anyways, checking happens often enough that the risk of being considered a liar and a fraud for claiming experience you don't have is high.

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mablopoule 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure why you're downvoted, but this is the right take IMO. I hate cheating and lying in general, but in any job posting you have to separate what are the actual requirement in term of knowledge versus what can be realistically learned on the job / doing a prototype in a weekend.

Of course don't fraud by like pretending you're a statistician when you have absolutely no mathematical background, but also don't take at face value the "Must have {x} years of experience in {y} tech" requirement when you know you have the necessary work experience to have a good grasp on it in a few weekend prototypes, and you also know that the job doesn't actually require deep expertise of that particular tech.

I did the same for my first React.js job, and I didn't feel bad because 1) I was honest about it and did not sold myself as a React expert, and 2) I had 10 years of front-end development, and I understood web dev enough to not be baffled by hooks and the difference between shallow copy vs. deep copy of a data structure, so passing technical test was good enough for it.