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"Years of experience in X language/platform" is largely a recruitment pathology...

It's open to interpretation and isn't anywhere near as useful as it looks at first glance. As has been said, the Years of Experience Myth is a good read. But also, different people thrive in different cultural environments and modes of work - (eg. Agile and dynamic versus highly organised and stringently engineered, etc).

Also, crucially, the measurement of "years of experience" itself can be inaccurate. Here's an example from my career: my main task is developing and maintaining a Java web app. However, this runs off a back end which is MFC/C++/SQL Server. Consequently I'm dealing with C++ code on a virtually daily basis too. BUT - this C++ experience is relatively superficial and maintenance-oriented, and I don't really write entire big components or products from scratch in MFC/C++ anymore.

Can I still count these last 5 years as "5 years of C++ experience"? Maybe. Maybe not. Depending on how I want to sell it to secure a particular role, I can easily overplay it, or I can admit that it wasn't really 5 solid "years of C++ experience". :) I'm sure plenty of cases are similarly open to inaccuracy of measurement.

Bobby Tables
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