>I've seen plenty of people with 3 months experience do better than people with 3 years experience. Some also have dealt with logic or projects at a much younge

>I've seen plenty of people with 3 months experience do better than people with 3 years experience. Some also have dealt with logic or projects at a much younger age or in college That's the undefined - and, most often, unencompassable - aspect of informal experience. Personal example: I was doing pretty intense C++ programming starting when I was about 13 as first an apprentice, and then a "real" developer on a finite element analysis program. I wrote the 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D mesh generators. I learned a couple DOS graphics packages for visualizing the mesh, the analysis, and the results. None of that was especially documentable: it took going through school and blowing most of my programming courses out of the water to get the formal experience. And, because I was doing this as a hobby/side-project with a friend, I was also missing a lot of what most people would think are core aspects of programming (didn't learn recursion, for example, until my second year in college - a solid 5+ years after it would have made our project far more manageable and expandable).