You wanted someone who could get a running start 12 months ago... It might be reasonable to conclude that you would be better off finding a qualified and flexible candidate in the next 2 months who could make progress in the following 1-3 months, rather than waiting another 6+ months for Godot.

I've been working professionally in eCommerce for 7 years and have been writing OO PHP code since I was 16. I've been out of work for 6 months and cannot find a job because my last job used the Zend framework and now the industry seems to only want Laravel and Magneto developers.

I've found my experience in eCommerce is in general is completely over looked simply because I don't have professional experience with the exact framework a company is using. I have a good understanding of everything else that goes into building eCommerce sites, things like payment gateways, eCommerce analytics, etc, but the conversation always goes like this:

- "We're looking for someone with strong PHP backend skills for our eCommerce site"

- "Cool, I've been working in eCommerce for 7 years now. And I have been using PHP for over 10. I should be a really good match."

- "What's your experience with Magneto?"

- "I've played with it a little in personal projects, but I don't have any industry experience. I'm very willing to learn though. I have professional experience with other frameworks and CMS's like Zend and Wordpress so I shouldn't find it too hard."

- "Yeah, sorry we're really looking for a Magneto whizz to help us out. I don't think you have the experience we need."

I'm not sure what devs who don't have the luxury of being in a job that changes tech stacks every 5 years are suppose to do. Another example is that I've been keeping up with Node & Express in personal projects, but I can't land a job in either because I don't have the "experience". So yeah, now I'm completely out of money and losing my house and car I've realised I'm going to have to restart my career and entire life because of this crap.

I would absolutely love to learn magneto. I'd be willing to put in 2 hours of my own time every day to catch up, but I find it hard to believe someone with a year of PHP and magneto experience would be more valuable to a company that me.

I also can't believe how many people are asking for version numbers of things I've worked with either. I have Angular experience, but I'm frequently told my experience with Angular 1 isn't good enough. It's really quite ridiculous considering it only took me about a week to get a decent grasp on Angular in the first place.

What's the difference getting a good smart person now who can bring themselves up in a month vs waiting another month (or more!) for someone with the keyword?

Then you fall into a specific scenario where you need someone who has a very specific keyword on a Resume. There are a lot of candidates on the market right now for all the standard positions, web javascript, mobile objective-c and swift, backend NoSQL and java, etc. Which is what I was referring to.