“We really need somebody with five years of CloudCode.”
“We need someone with AI.”
Really?
So let me get this straight. You want five years of experience in something that’s barely five years old…and you’re surprised you can’t find anyone?
Unfortunately, this has become one of the biggest challenges in AI hiring today.
Before you hire your next engineer, ask them this:
- What technology are you teaching yourself right now that your company doesn’t use? Why that?
- Tell me about something you’ve built on your own. What problem were you trying to solve, and what did you learn?
- When’s the last time you went down a rabbit hole just because you were curious? Walk me through it.
- If I gave you six months to learn one technology that isn’t part of your current job, what would you choose and why?
- Show me something you’re proud of that isn’t on your resume.
- How would you solve the problems that we are currently struggling with?
Every job description looks the same now. AI. Agents. LangChain. MCP. Prompt Engineering. Throw enough buzzwords into the mix and somehow we’ve described the perfect engineer.
I’ve been hearing versions of this for almost thirty years.
Every new technology goes through the same cycle. Java. .NET. AWS. Kubernetes. React. Now AI, cloud-native development, agents, MCP, and whatever new framework showed up this week.
Do you need someone who’s built production AI systems? Someone who’s played with ChatGPT? Someone who watched a few YouTube videos on prompt engineering? Somebody who added “LLMs” to their LinkedIn headline last Tuesday?
Everyone wants experience, but here’s the question nobody asks.
Experience doing what?
When you’re working somewhere, you don’t always get to choose your stack.
You think you’re hiring for AI experience.
You’re not.
You’re hiring for whatever technology their employer approved six months ago.
Stop interviewing the company’s technology decisions instead of interviewing the human.
If leadership hasn’t approved AI yet, they’re probably not building AI into production, no matter how excited they are about it.
That doesn’t mean they’re behind. It just means their employer hasn’t made that move yet.
Some of the best candidates I meet spend their nights and weekends building things the company hasn’t even thought about yet.
What actually gets people hired
- Communication
- Adaptability
- Learning speed
- Curiosity
- Problem solving
- Ownership
- Business understanding
- Explaining technical decisions
- Building trust
You know who I’m interviewing? The guy who’s building AI in his basement after the kids go to bed because he thinks it’s cool. His company doesn’t even use it yet.
Stop interviewing yesterday’s tech stack.
Start interviewing tomorrow’s curiosity.
The candidate you’re overlooking is the one who’s building AI at home because they’re fascinated by it—not because their boss assigned it. Monday morning they’re back maintaining a Java application from 2014. Their resume says Java. Their future says something completely different.
That’s how you find your founding engineer. Your next technical leader. The person your competitors will wish they hired first.
Anybody can hire for today’s technology. The companies that win hire the people who’ll figure out tomorrow’s before everyone else does.
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