I don't know what benefit "experience" has. I've worked with plenty of people who had long careers, worked at big name companies, and went to fancy schools, an

I don't know what benefit "experience" has. I've worked with plenty of people who had long careers, worked at big name companies, and went to fancy schools, and turned out to be some variety of dumb or useless. If your experience benefits you in someway I should be able to detect that in our interview - you'll give good answers to questions because you're experienced enough to know good answers, that kind of thing. If you seem smart in the interview because of your years of experience, your natural genius, or some combination of the two, what's the difference? What I care about is that you are a smart person, not how you came by your ability. If you learned to program video games at age 8 and now have fourty years of experience or if you finished a boot camp yesterday - who cares? If you can discuss and write the programs I ask about that seems like a good signal and if not, not. I feel like I can just skip finding out about your history and not lose anything.