For people new to tech or applying to roles and trying to get “experience” in something let me break down roughly what companies are looking for

If you see a role that says 1-2 years experience what they want you to have is an understanding of

• what it takes to run that technology in production
• a rough idea of when you would choose that technology over another
• how to make the technology highly available

This is beyond reading the docs or following a hello world example

Companies are going to trust you to run that technology (or something like it) and need to make sure you’ve at least struggled a bit to ship it

At 2-4 years experience you should know

• how to fix the tech under pressure. You’ve probably had an outage and are not familiar with where to start with debugging
• how to scale or adapt the tech beyond what the docs have recommendations for

At this point you’ve used the tool in anger. You’ve worked on it with a team, and you understand what parts are particularly fragile

For 5-7 years experience

• you’ve done at least one major upgrade of the tech.
• You have a bit of a history and know where the tech has been and where it’s going
• you’ve probably run at least one alternative tech in prod and have a deeper understanding of differences

You may have contributed to the tech if it’s OSS, are active in the community, or had some feature implemented that you asked for or influenced. You probably know the company/people behind the tech and maybe even keep up with releases and attend conferences

8+ years of any technology you’re an expert

• you have articles or conference talks about it (internal or external)
• you have convinced at least one person to not use that tech because it wasn’t a good fit for them
• you’re so familiar with what breaks it’s automated

Companies who want this level of experience are looking for a leader and someone who can drive adoption in a big way. You can install and scale the tech without too much trouble and can adapt it to multiple environments on a whiteboard.

More importantly you can teach it to other people and level up everyone around you because of your depth of knowledge

It may be hard to get enough experience to get a job but that shouldn’t stop you from getting experience on your own
In some cases you can also get more “years” faster by focusing on learning these areas

If you want to be an expert focus on scale and upgrades without downtime. Also you can accelerate your experience by teaching the technology to people publicly