You find a role you like. You read the requirements, count ten of them, work out that you can honestly claim six, and close the tab. Or you meet the internal version: a piece of work goes past that you would love, you are not quite the obvious person for it, and you let somebody else put their hand up.
It helps to know how that list of ten was actually made.
It was not written by one person describing a colleague they have met. It was assembled. The hiring manager wrote four lines, the tech lead added the two things that annoyed them most on the last project, somebody pasted a paragraph out of an older advert for a slightly different job, and a recruiter added cloud experience because every advert has it. Nobody sat back at the end and asked whether a single human being on earth matched the result. It is a wish, not a standard, and the person who got that job last time had holes in it too.
So apply at around six. Say the gaps plainly rather than hiding them, because hiding is what really costs you. I have not run that queue in production. I have worked with two others and I would expect to be useful inside a month and quick inside three. Nobody is startled by that. What they will not forgive is discovering it in week three, after you nodded.
Be honest about the difference between a gap and a wall. Never having written a line of the language they build everything in is a wall. Not having their exact monitoring stack, or their scale, or five years where you have three, is a gap, and gaps close.
The same reasoning works inside your own company, where it is even cheaper to try. You know the people. They already know your work. The worst realistic outcome of asking for the migration and not getting it is that your name is now in somebody's head as the person who wanted it, which is not a loss.
You are not applying to be judged sufficient. You are asking a room to make a decision, and they cannot pick you out of a process you never entered.
– Asael Shinder
