Is it really 8 years of experience? If you spent the last 6 years doing the same thing basically, it's really just 2 years with lots of sets/reps.. Years of experience are overrated and I think HR folks are just trying to control IT/tech departments by imposing their standard lingo/Y.O.E. requirements
In my first programming job, the team was busy with an fix-the-alpha/get-the-beta-out crunch so they assigned me and the other new member a game project to code. I did networked Othello, using Java Swing over Java RMI. The code design was poor since I didn't know better but it kept us busy and we got to present it to the rest of the team (it was a nice diversion from their crunch-time). The code review was strict but good natured (as they knew we didn't know better). But we learned.
> If you spent the last 6 years doing the same thing basically, it's really just 2 years with lots of sets/reps.
There was a comment of TheDailyWTF ( http://www.thedailywtf.com/ ) of the form "Some people get 10 years experience, some people get 10 * one years experience." There's also a quote "Wisdom comes with age but sometimes age comes alone."
In my first programming job, the team was busy with an fix-the-alpha/get-the-beta-out crunch so they assigned me and the other new member a game project to code. I did networked Othello, using Java Swing over Java RMI. The code design was poor since I didn't know better but it kept us busy and we got to present it to the rest of the team (it was a nice diversion from their crunch-time). The code review was strict but good natured (as they knew we didn't know better). But we learned.