> Yet we state in job requirements "5 years experience with ____" with a sweeping generalization for everyone that has worked with ____ 5 years. I'd be happy t

> Yet we state in job requirements "5 years experience with ____" with a sweeping generalization for everyone that has worked with ____ 5 years. I'd be happy to hire somebody with five years of experience. However I might get somebody with ten times six months of experience instead. Not the same thing. My point is: somebody who has worked on a thing so big that it took five years, and watched its growing pains and observed it take detours and outright wrong paths has learned a great deal, and I'd be eager to have them on my team. Somebody who spent the last five years banging out lots of cookie-cutter two-month projects doesn't bring that experience at all. > So why are many companies grouping applicants by years of experience, and not by quality? This is a reasonable question. If somebody has long experience, this is a quality, in my experience. But, as I explained above, plain counting years gives no valuable information. > The only forward answer that I have gotten was "because it's easy, and a measure (but not THE measure)". I don't find this answer satisfactory. Neither do I. As an aside (which some might object to), I feel myself growing sympathetic to reverse-ageism: I'd prefer to only have people older than 30 years on my team. To put it most bluntly: somebody that old will very likely have been egregiously wrong before, will have failed spectacularly before. It has been my experience that this makes people better engineers, and better teammates. People who haven't met with failure yet make me suspicious. Now get off my lawn.