Apologies for a post that s pretty much 100% anecdotal... This article rings true to me. My wife ran into this after college only for her industry (biomedical

Apologies for a post that s pretty much 100% anecdotal... This article rings true to me. My wife ran into this after college only for her industry (biomedical engineering) it is 5 years for "entry level" and they didn't even count her paid college jobs even though they were relevant experience. Robotics is even worse. Unless you've been building robots as a hobby for the last 5-10 years (which is a VERY expensive hobby btw) it doesn't matter how much other engineering or programming experience you have, they won't take you. I got lucky with the opposite. I started paid programming in high school and employers counted my high school and college jobs as experience and I had three competing mid-level offers at graduation. So I skipped entry level entirely. And this was in 2007 right before the recession really kicked in so companies were already starting to hold back on hiring. On the flip side, an actual entry level coder we just hired expects to be working on fun new R&D stuff even though he has 0 experience and I thought we set expectations during the interview. We have him working on bug fixing and client change orders (he will eventually get to R&D but someone needs to fix the bugs, we can't all work on just the "fun" stuff).