It's kind of like dating. You fill out your Tinder profile and you say you want someone SMART and FUNNY and BEAUTIFUL and TALENTED and INDEPENDENT and NERDY but also ATHLETIC and WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU and MAKES A LOT OF MONEY and HAS COOL PARENTS and ENJOYS THE SAME THINGS YOU DO and and and and...
And then you go on dates, and you realize that that perfect person doesn't exist, so on a case-by-case basis you say, "This person is smart and funny and talented and nerdy and I love spending time with them, but not the most attractive or the most athletic, and you know, that's OK!" or maybe "This person is beautiful and funny and athletic, and they also can't carry a tune or understand the complexities of my work life... but I can deal with that!" or in many cases, "This person ticks off every one of those boxes except.... we don't have anything in common and our conversations are boring... so no thanks."
Similarly, we have job descriptions that are say that we want someone with these 100 different things... and then we get the applicants in and pick the ones that satisfy as many of them as we possibly can. OK, so maybe you don't have 10 years of Go experience, but you have 5 years of Python experience AND you built your own CI/CD pipeline? That's cool! Let's talk. I can teach you Go, and you can bring your CI/CD genius to the table!
It's about putting your ideal case out there and seeing what comes in and then deciding what to compromise on.
If this sounds weird to you, consider the alternative: posting the minimum requirements. It would like filling out your Tinder profile and saying you want someone who CAN BREATHE and HAS SKIN and BATHES SOMETIMES. lol, how big of a disaster would THAT be?
(The big secret is: apply for any job that looks interesting, whether you think you satisfy the requirements or not. You never know! Honestly, most of it's for SEO anyway.)
Does that help?
Unsolicited speculation: I wonder if this is related to your hiring woes? I have vague memories of seeing research along the lines that marginalized groups are less likely to apply to positions that do things like "Want 10 years of Go experience". Of course not everyone already knows "the big secret" and maybe (some?) marginalized groups are less likely to know it.
I'm pretty sure I've seen lively debate on HN about this practice, as well, though I wouldn't know what keywords to search for. It's definitely not universal in the industry, or at least it's a continuum. An example I remember recently seeing of a posting on the lower end of the "requirements" spectrum is Mighty App[2], where the list of posted requirements is two items long. I think HN user 'tptacek has written about taking this even to the extreme of having no posted requirements, and doing all candidate qualification via a practical exercise.
Of course if you go that route then you might make the screening phase more difficult. You'd also have to convince Recruiting/HR to go along with it.
[1] After a month at my first job in the industry (I came from academia) I idly checked out the job listing for the position I was then holding, since I hadn't come in through a job listing but rather through a recruiter. There were something like eight "requirements", and I held exactly one of them (a PhD).
[2] https://www.notion.so/Mighty-is-hiring-945d3168d3e34a37883ca...
