DSP remains a skill-shortage area: yet an employer obsession with experience means legions of freshly qualified Masters students - who have literally mastered their trade - are ignored by employers and recruiters.

In this talk I will moan about pointless and pathetic recruitment gatekeeping practices, big up the star quality of the many hundreds of Masters students, and engineers transitioning from othe fields into digital, with whom I have worked, trash the supposed superior knowledge of the gatekeepers, and politely suggest that employers take a long hard look at themselves and start to take some responsibility for growing the next generation of DSP engineers.