Hey everyone. I figured this wouldn't be a bad place to ask this question as I'm sure there's a lot of software developers here who aren't developing games for a living. Anyway, I'm a soon to be second year CS student and I absolutely love programming / software design, I spend lots of my free time working on personal projects. There's something that kind of worries me though. I had a quick look at job listings just out of curiousity and I noticed that for every single listing the employer lists off atleast 10 obscure tools that are *required* for the position. I always figured that knowing how to program in a few languages and having the math / problem solving ability would be enough to get a job and you would be expected to quickly learn the tools on the job. My question might be a bit ignorrant but, do the employers really expect the applicant to be intimately familiar with all of these obscure required tools?

You're not going to like this, but the answer is "it depends on the job".

First off, what you might consider an "obscure tool" might be something a professional developer wouldn't even consider working without. Can you post some examples?

Secondly, job postings will usually list a few core competencies (i.e. web services, ui) and the languages and technologies used (i.e. winforms or html5). You are usually expected to match these pretty closely.

They will then typically list a few "nice to haves", such as familiarity with MySQL, or knowledge of SVN. Most of the time, there's some flexibility here, especially if you can demonstrate that you have wither done something similar or that you can pick things up pretty quick.

Finally, no-one expects a graduate to know everything fresh out of college. You will learn more in your first few months of a real job, than in all the years at college.

As ChaosEngine said, "it depends on the job". However, that doesn't mean you get to wander around the void. If you're a Web Developer, then you know that you need to know HTML, ASP/PHP and SQL. Hands down. If you're doing internal websites, then honestly, IMO, you can get away with that. If you're doing external websites, then you need to know the previously mentioned as well as: Javascript, and CSS. Depending on what kind of data you're passing around maybe XML and XSLT.

At the end of the day, if you can show an employer examples of what you can do, then you're one step closer to getting that job. Making demos, but fully fleshed and ready for production, allows you to get familiar with the product. When you go to interview, you'll definitely have a command and good understanding of the topic and what it is the interviewer is looking for.

Even in college, especially nowadays, just expect that any employer is going to expect you to have experience with X technology. And since just about every Dev environment and IDE is free or close to it, it's not a high or unfair expectation. Show your skill. Have a portfolio. Ok, get crackin!

I second what the first responder said. And those "obscure" tools you haven't been exposed to yet? You've only been through your first year of study. You may well hear of those tools before you graduate.

I had a quick look at job listings just out of curiousity and I noticed that for every single listing the employer lists off atleast 10 obscure tools that are *required* for the position.

Don't forget the 3-5 years experience.

I always figured that knowing how to program in a few languages and having the math / problem solving ability would be enough to get a job and you would be expected to quickly learn the tools on the job.
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I wish half of my coworkers with 5-10 years of experience had even that.

My question might be a bit ignorrant but, do the employers really expect the applicant to be intimately familiar with all of these obscure required tools?
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Some will. HR people will more often expect it. Good companies will test your ability to solve problems, communicate, and understand what you say you do. As a graduate, understand that you can (and should) apply for jobs that "require" things that you don't have. Sell your strengths, acknowledge and downplay your weaknesses.

My question might be a bit ignorrant but, do the employers really expect the applicant to be intimately familiar with all of these obscure required tools?

Some will. HR people will more often expect it. Good companies will test your ability to solve problems, communicate, and understand what you say you do. As a graduate, understand that you can (and should) apply for jobs that "require" things that you don't have. Sell your strengths, acknowledge and downplay your weaknesses.
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I second that. In most cases, employers who are dogmatic about needing in-depth knowledge into a particular language, library, or tool are fools. Either the person that wrote the hiring position doesn't understand software development, or the person hiring doesn't understand it. Hope that its the former. I actually tend to not favor applying for jobs that require very specific "minimum x years experience in y".

In summary, don't worry about this too much. Even when you have ten or twenty years in the industry, there are going to be jobs out there that will want to pretend that you're not qualified for because you lack some esoteric bit of experience (when in reality, you're more than qualified for the job). Those usually aren't the companies you want to be working for anyway.

In summary, don't worry about this too much. Even when you have ten or twenty years in the industry, there are going to be jobs out there that will want to pretend that you're not qualified for because you lack some esoteric bit of experience (when in reality, you're more than qualified for the job). Those usually aren't the companies you want to be working for anyway.

To be fair, there are a few occasions where good companies will appears to be doing bad hiring. Often times, companies will post a job, do a few interviews for appearances because their HR department (or lawyers) require them to go through the process, even for contract-to-hire scenarios or the case where someone good is known from previous jobs. Even though the hiring manager knows who they're hiring, they can't just hire them direct without the perception of impropriety. So they post a perfectly tailored job req for the person they want, get a few candidates in who are at least arguably "unqualified", and then hire who they want.

The majority of the time this isn't the case, but it's always wise not to burn bridges in business.

The point of your qualifications is to get you to a position where you can have a face-to-face interview. Resumes, CVs, and all that jazz are just filtering mechanisms to minimize the number of applicants who have to be directly interviewed. If your resume is good enough, you will land the interview, at which point you can make a case for your strengths and weaknesses.

For this reason I shy away from explicit lists of tools and skills I've accumulated on my resume; instead, I talk about the kinds of things I've done and problems I've worked on. Good hiring people will read this and interpret it as my ability to use the tools of the trade effectively; bad hiring people will not see their favorite buzzwords, and will kindly spare me the agony of having to talk to them by filing my resume in the round cabinet forthwith.

Remember, the goal of having a resume/CV is to get you into an interview where you can do the actual job of selling your skills. That's where things like flexibility, adaptability, willingness and ability to learn quickly, etc. are investigated, and that's where you can prove that you're really qualified for a job even if you're not up to speed 100% on certain things. Any decent employer knows that there are many ways to solve a given problem, and you may simply not have exposure to the tools they prefer - but you damn well better understand what the tools do and why they are important, or you're wasting everyone's time.

For instance, the job I just entered requires use of Perforce for source control and asset management. I've never touched Perforce before, but I have plenty of experience with other systems like Subversion and Mercurial, so I didn't need that particular buzzword - I demonstrated in my resume bullet points that I know how version control works, and that's sufficient.

Focus on getting to a point with your experience and work portfolio (yes, you need one even if you aren't in the games industry) where you can demonstrate core competency, and learning the specific tools will be much less of an issue. Again, though, you'd better understand what the tools do and why they are useful; just because you can't recite the complete command line specs for grep doesn't excuse you for not knowing what it's for.

My question might be a bit ignorrant but, do the employers really expect the applicant to be intimately familiar with all of these obscure required tools?
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Pros specialize in one thing so they will have a wealth of knowledge on the tools of the trade in that area. So yeah, that is correct.

Even if you don't know the tools specifically, they probably want you to demonstrate that you are at-least familiar with the concepts behind using the tools.

My question might be a bit ignorrant but, do the employers really expect the applicant to be intimately familiar with all of these obscure required tools?

No they don't, they hope to get applicants that are experienced with all or most of those tools but they're not really expecting to get it.
The "insane" requirements are usually for senior positions, entry level positions (which is what you should be hunting as a fresh graduate) aren't always advertised so check the company websites or contact them directly.