Yet employers are always looking for a large number of years experience doing just one thing; to me, it seems that a competent developer can learn a new language and development tool-set well enough to be effective (albeit slowed down by frequent reference to the book) in a fortnight, and become fluent and capable of developing software rapidly within 6 months. Of course with complex horror stories like C++ and its assorted template libraries or Java and its run-time packages that assumes that the developer learns the bits he is likely to use, not the whole foul mess, while with something like T-SQL it's comparatively to learn it all in a fairly short time, so in some cases an employer may be justified in asking for more experience of a particular development technology, but there's no justification for asking for five or ten years experience with a particular development setup. A DBA of course isn't just learning T-SQL but learning the way SQL-Server does recovery, what is available in the way of features that reduce risk of data loss and/or time for recovery, and so on, but there's no real reason for asking for five years experience with configuring log shipping. What a DBA or a developer really needs is lots of experience of doing lots of different things, and the difficult part of the job is choosing algorithms, data structures, modular structure, and error management and security mechanisms, not churning the coding or configuration handle. But what HR departments and recruitment agents generally ask for is lots of experience of doing the same thing over and over again, and t is almost always trivia that they choose to ask for years of experience of. If some developers and DBAs are deluded into thinking they are gaining useful extra experience by repeating the same 6 months of activity twice a year for ten years that's more the fault of the recruitment process which asks for candidates with that repetition of the same experience than of the poor deluded DBAs and developers.