One of the biggest blights on the industry is the insistence on matching tech stack. Most jobs need a handful of strict but broad requirements like "has worked in a garbage-collected compiled language" or "has used a SQL database" or "has used the .NET ecosystem", or they're looking for a specialist in a particular field like compiler design or distributed systems. Instead they've got a list of hard requirements: "Go, PostgreSQL, Azure, gRPC, 10 years of experience with RAFT (other consensus algorithms like PAXOS not acceptable), some obscure ORM," etc.
Not all hiring managers and not even all engineers understand that every requirement winnows down the available candidates. Eventually you're left with only the people who are desperate enough to apply despite not meeting half your list of requirements. Those candidates are on average not as strong as the ones you'd get if you just asked for software engineers with any experience in consensus algorithms and listed your tech stack as an FYI.
Similar to this is demanding skills in specific AWS services. It is incredibly grating because they end up fixating on mostly BS, non-transferable knowledge because it’s easy to test for.
Not all hiring managers and not even all engineers understand that every requirement winnows down the available candidates. Eventually you're left with only the people who are desperate enough to apply despite not meeting half your list of requirements. Those candidates are on average not as strong as the ones you'd get if you just asked for software engineers with any experience in consensus algorithms and listed your tech stack as an FYI.