As an HR-ism, "years of experience" is a stupid metric. I agree. I only included such criteria for the 2.0 and 2.5 level, which characterize the top 1-2 percen

As an HR-ism, "years of experience" is a stupid metric. I agree. I only included such criteria for the 2.0 and 2.5 level, which characterize the top 1-2 percent (or less) of programmers. I should add that while I've never seen people reach 2.0+ without programming for 10 years (even if they weren't holding a professional-level job during all that time; they might have started at 14) I am not saying it can't happen. But 2.0+ engineers are uncommon and it has to be very rare for someone to get there without the Gladwellian "10,000 hours". If you're looking to hire 2.0+ engineers, you're not using HR-isms. You don't pay attention to the standard HR bullshit about "must have Ph.D." or "must have 5 years of experience". You're often trying to fill the roles through referrals, because those people aren't on the job market for very long, and they tend to have very high requirements with regard to the jobs they take. You don't find these people using an HR checklist and filtering thousands of off-the-street CVs. Most people aren't trying to hire 2.0+, because the work that a 2.0+ engineer will find interesting is uncommon and few companies even have use for that high a level of work. I've been programming for 6 years, and have been aggressively managing my career in the direction of optimizing for learning, sometimes quitting jobs solely on account of boredom, and other times "stealing an education" from jobs, and I'm only 1.7-1.8. The 2.0's are rare and I've never met one under 30 (although it's certainly possible).