As someone who worked in software development during High School, and took time off before University to work in software, this somewhat frustrates me.
Alyssa Rosenzweig has 0 years of experience under this model.
Here I am 44 years later with zero years of experience because I keep adding more years of college and university. I am not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, but I found college "easy" because I had years of professional discipline meeting deadlines.
This idea of counting experience only after you left college is absolute nonsense.
And too add, I never actually graduated from the UK equivalent of high school, which drives HR people nuts, especially when they find out that the CTO of the company they are acquiring is a high school dropout.
The usual reason I see for down leveling is because being technically savvy is not what companies actually look for. I'm talking most jobs rather than being in an R&D division that is PhD heavy.
* Understanding the modern SDLC in a corporate environment and best practices. Academia often doesn't do things in a way that would be considered good production practices outside of it. Both from a process and a technical (CICD, heavy testing, layered frameworks, etc.) point of view.
* The culture of academia differs from corporate which means that while you gain soft skills they are biased versus what you'd get in a corporate environment. That can have subtle or not so subtle impact on decision making.