I fully agree. For most of my 3 decades in programming, I've considered myself a badass programmer, but in retrospect, there are always glaring mistakes that we

I fully agree. For most of my 3 decades in programming, I've considered myself a badass programmer, but in retrospect, there are always glaring mistakes that were not evident to me at the time. One concrete benefit of requiring N years of experience, with N greater than 2, is that one of the major career learning experiences is to deal with one's own code in "maintenance mode", and you can only experience that if you have a number of years of distance from when you originally wrote the code. Of course, requiring N years of experience is no guarantee that the candidate has dealt with this situation, as there are people who (consciously or not) structure their careers to avoid ever retreading their own code.