[david_allison]

> We start counting years after formal schooling (high school or college). Grad school often counts as indirect experience.

As someone who worked in software development during High School, and took time off before University to work in software, this somewhat frustrates me.

Alyssa Rosenzweig has 0 years of experience under this model.

[justinlloyd]

Me too. I never left school. I shipped my first commercial product in 1978 at the age of 11, launched my first company at age 14, and sold my first company at age 19.

Here I am 44 years later with zero years of experience because I keep adding more years of college and university. I am not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, but I found college "easy" because I had years of professional discipline meeting deadlines.

This idea of counting experience only after you left college is absolute nonsense.

And too add, I never actually graduated from the UK equivalent of high school, which drives HR people nuts, especially when they find out that the CTO of the company they are acquiring is a high school dropout.

[KevinEldon]

May you continue to work until you no longer want to, create on your own terms, and drive as many HR people nuts as possible!

[justinlloyd]

I have never worked a day in my life. I get paid generous amounts of money to play.

[Xcelerate]

Yeah, I was a bit frustrated with this as well. I was somewhat down-leveled right after finishing my PhD because a lot of employers didn't consider it experience, even though I did high performance computing work with projects that had multiple stakeholders. Honestly, I was more technically savvy then than I am now 4 years into working at a large tech company.

[marcinzm]

>Honestly, I was more technically savvy then than I am now 4 years into working at a large tech company.

The usual reason I see for down leveling is because being technically savvy is not what companies actually look for. I'm talking most jobs rather than being in an R&D division that is PhD heavy.

* Understanding the modern SDLC in a corporate environment and best practices. Academia often doesn't do things in a way that would be considered good production practices outside of it. Both from a process and a technical (CICD, heavy testing, layered frameworks, etc.) point of view.

* The culture of academia differs from corporate which means that while you gain soft skills they are biased versus what you'd get in a corporate environment. That can have subtle or not so subtle impact on decision making.

[Mezzie]

Yup. I started web development when I was 5. There's a lot of very good, important things that you won't learn working as a kid (conflict resolution, dealing with bad business requests/requirements, etc), but at the same time, it's not like that experience is completely inapplicable either. If nothing else, 29 years of perspective on how web development has evolved and developer discussions means I have a radically different perspective than an 18 year old who decided to start learning to code last year.

[pumpkinprog]

Strongly agree. In some countries (for example, most of Eastern Europe), formal CS education is compatible with a full-time developer job during masters and even the last years of bachelor's studies. Therefore, some highly motivated guys can get 2-4 years of production experience upon graduation. Paying them a minimum wage is a great idea to distract talents!