Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I had a similar problem. Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
Finally HR called me and explained that for what the job entailed we couldn't possibly pay the market price for it.
I was like but that's the job. Shit I thought I had even made the JDs pretty succinct and austere already.
Nup, apparently we'd be paying upward for $100k for a job the guys in team were only getting $60k.
As you can imagine we got a lot of applications but 90% weren't even close to what we needed.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
Same.
I personally don't like hiring uni graduates. Their utterly lost and difficult to motivate. And almost always what they learned in university does not help whatsoever in the role. Especially dev roles.
For the work I'm involved in there a lot of exception handling. Solving the bugs and looking at the relationship between the stacks. It's more of a puzzle.