I checked out the Fog Creek description, and found this:<p>Penalty:<p>Low level / highly repetitive tasks (rote tech support, manual black box testing) are collapsed into one year. (You don’t have three years of experience, you have the same year experience three times over).<p>I'm sorry, but this is just such a generalization that it should be stricken. Yes - I understand that this is his view, but especially the last line can be off-the-charts wrong.<p>I've worked with people doing this kind of work, and the competency is all over the spectrum. Even at those low levels, you have people that become good / intimate enough with the systems, that they can advance to more technical positions. It COMPLETELY depends on how motivated one is - some "rock star" tech supports and testers actually take the time to read technical documents, review code, analyze the systems, etc. While others will do the absolute minimum.<p>EDIT: Also, not considering non-professional experience as experience is highly individual / something you need to look at one a case-b-case basis. If some dev. with xx years of daily open-source (or similar) applies, you absolutely should take a look at his work.<p>One anecdote: One of the best software engineers I personally know had a huge problem breaking into the industry, for years. He had no formal education, or professional SE experience, but spent all his spare time working on his own projects, or doing open-source projects.<p>When some big-name software company finally took a chance on him, he practically flew through the ranks - because he had a solid 20 years of "experience", compared to his colleagues - most fresh grads, or even managers.