What are you even talking about? His opinion is not remotely controversial. Every populist hivemind drone on this site contends some form of this argument. Not a single person is (at least, getting upvoted) DEFENDING high or reasonable hiring bars - that is a controversial opinion.
The two parent comments fall under the general umbrella of complaining about job listings requiring too much experience which is a standard point of contention against employers on HN. Leaving "20 years required low latency python experience with executive level leadership experience to manage our old undocumented report writing application" listings written by incompetent HR people out of the picture, there is plenty of valid monetary reasoning why a company would try to minimize its Type I error (that is hard to do, and nobody complaining seems to have any cogent solution). There are more than plenty of jobs an overconfident new grad who is good at interviewing and fibbing on his resume will fail at where a developer with several years of experience bringing projects into production is a much safer option. That is not disproved by singular anecdotal evidence of "I lied on my resume but I did do a good job so their hiring bar filtered out most of the good candidates and it isn't fair!".
However, most people reading this are employees, not employers, and have been burned by this in some way or another, so I'm going to get downvoted.
And then we also hear entreaties from employers that there is a shortage of programmers and policy changes are needed, a position that looks less sympathetic in light of a tendency to only hire experienced candidates.
There are no doubt hypocrisies and fallacies on both sides, employers included. I am certainly not arguing against that. That's a different debate, though.
Employees want to get rich, employers want free work from overqualified candidates so they get rich. People usually try to pick what they think at the time is the best option available to them, job or candidate.
