Every job description asks for years. Eight to ten years of experience. Twelve plus. It is the first filter, and it measures elapsed time.
Elapsed time is not practice. Two people with the same number on their resume can differ by an order of magnitude in what they have actually done, and the number cannot see the difference. Somebody can spend a decade repeating one year, and the filter reads that as a decade.
I know what my own arithmetic looks like because I did the ugly part in public view of nobody. I taught myself design. For a stretch of about three hundred days I worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at it, most of that on things nobody paid me for and nobody saw. That is somewhere near four thousand hours. A comfortable year at a desk job, once you remove meetings, status updates and the hours that are attendance rather than work, gets you maybe a thousand.
I am not holding that up as a method. It cost things, and I would not prescribe it to anyone. It is just what the number was, and no resume field exists that can hold it.
So why do we keep using years? Because they are cheap. At the volume Indian companies hire, a recruiter has minutes per candidate and needs a signal that can be checked without judgement. Years, a degree, a recognisable employer. All three are proxies for the thing they actually want, and all three are easy to verify, which is why they survive.
The cost lands on exactly the people the industry claims to want. Somebody who taught themselves, who shipped something real early, who went deep instead of long, gets filtered by a field that cannot represent them. Elsewhere that person often starts a company, and the market judges the work directly. Here the same person applies through a form and gets sorted by a number.
I do not think this is uniquely Indian. I think it is what happens when applicant volume is high and screening budget is low, and India has both.
The fix is not complicated, it is just expensive. Look at the work. Ask what the person actually decided, and what it cost them when they were wrong.
Nobody has time for that, which is the whole problem, and roughly the reason my portfolio exists.