In general, people are completely uninterested in experience that they don't understand, I've found. They don't want to even ask about it because it would showcase that they, gasp, don't know something that you do.
> In general, people are completely uninterested in experience that they don't understand...
It depends on the interviewer. I have colleagues who are risk averse. They want to stick with the tried and true. I on the other hand am a bit of risk taker. If you told me about something that I knew nothing about, and it was a legitimate way to improve things, you will have peaked my curiosity. I would immediately want to know more.
Also, it helps if the hiring person is an experienced dev. In my org, managers do not participate in the hiring of developers, other than background checks and verifying references.
One of the other things that I was thinking of was the notion of humility and curiosity. For me personally, I like to brainstorm and improv a bit and then shrink down to a proper design or method. This type of process is extremely difficult to communicate in an interview if the interviewer is either not curious or doesn't possess humility or both.
True. 9/10 of the interviewers I have met only focus on exact experience by matching keywords, and they won't be able to identify superior candidates with slightly different experience. The reason is simply time and effort.
The upside of this is that being able to position yourself in a hot niche will get you tons of interviews without even applying. The downside is that careers become extremely path dependent, which is a bit scary.
Hell, a lot of the times I don't even have keywords anywhere on my resume or profiles, and yet I get interviewed and then asked about said missing keywords. It's bizarre.
