I’ve always thought it a bit stupid the way that recruiters ask for a set number of years experience in a given skill.  As any coder worth their salt knows, doing menial codemonkey tasks every working day for a decade doesn’t put you in the same league as a guru who burns the midnight oil to become an expert in a given field.

So, I found this comment on the Daily WTF forum particularly accurate:

"When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times."

So true.