You’re advice to beware of companies who want “years of experience” is very valuable. After graduating I learned OOP, Software Patterns, and a few frameworks on my own. However, most companies I have worked for have had senior developers who wrote the ‘official’ framework or program using procedural non-sense. When I contributed object oriented solutions, my contributions were redacted and I was told to stick with code that ‘others can understand’. From now on, I will carefully kick their code tires to see if I should waste my time or not. All too often I have been forced to meet unrealistic deadlines or overcome unreasonable expectations due to the ‘senior engineers’ lack of code craftsmanship. Just because the program works does not mean it’s right. When I want to make it better, I’m perceived as a threat. When I play their games it comes back to bite me in the end. Getting stakeholders, who don’t understand software to believe in my craftsmanship is difficult. It seems whoever gets into a company first is automatically perceived as a genius because they made something work that resulted in the sales to get them started. Perhaps a better strategy is to be the first into a company and write the software from the ground up, or just start my own company.