"Industry experience" primarily involves working on real-world projects with other people. It consists of the "soft skills": communication, project management, real-world problem solving, and the like, which can only be fully developed when working with others.

Industry experience contrasts with classroom experience, and is different from "hobbyist"-type experience when you work on things for yourself, by yourself.

Here's some good ways to gain industry experience:

• Join an open source project, where you'll be working with other people. Dedicate serious time to it. If you have a lot of free time, you might even consider treating it like a part-time job for a while. This yields a LOT of excellent industry experience, as the skills translate directly to a real job. This is the easiest way to gain experience.

• Look for internships, which will allow you to work on real projects in a work environment. It's important to watch out for scams - unpaid internships are only legal under very specific rules set by the U.S. Department of Labor (or the equivalent for your country). An employer offering good internships often benefits primarily from being able to train someone to take a non-entry position with their company, for less expense than if they hired an entry-level coder.

• Take an entry-level coding position. This is perhaps the hardest to find, especially as you want a position that has you actually writing code, and not fetching coffee. In the end, there isn't much difference between a good internship and a good entry-level position. However, as far as I can tell, of the three options, entry-level positions are the hardest to progress out of.

The way I've interpreted this is it means experience in a particular industry or market segment so that when a product owner says they need a program to do "X" you know what "X" is without a lengthy explanation.

For example, if you created a retail inventory tracking application, you would have retail inventory industry experience. If you created an app for hotels, you would have hospitality industry experience.

There can be crossover industry experience as well. I got my current job because I not only had manufacturing industry experience but also experience in working with devices like scales, barcodes and PLCs, although that wasn't at a manufacturing company.

This vote is utterly nonsense.

Experience is mostly overrated in that respect, that people having the belief, that spending time on something includes a somehow magical component of making you good at something. You could have worked 3 years in a groundhog-day-mode and everybody would look at you with different eyes than if you just did your first groundhog-day in your first job.

Second: Our work as developers is extremely complex. Even if you work with somebody who is 5 years on the job and hasn't had this "groundhog-day" type of work and is really interested in his field and a really good learner - even then there is a good chance that you have requirements the said developer has never worked with in his career.

And yes, you are totally right in questioning the prefix "industry". It adds absolutely nothing: leaving the question "but isn't it better having more experience outside the industry to provide outside of the box thinking and producing better solutions".

That does not help.

Degrees are simply a piece of paper which showed that you are able to solve certain types of problems which people in a institutionalized context confronted you with. The difference of having this degree is, that someone with authority is willing to confirm that. If degrees were that meaningful, we wouldn't need no further assessment during interview processes.

Confronted with this either-or-question, I would leave the room because these are the wrong metrics.

tl;dr

"Degrees" and "experience" are the wrong binary either-or-metrics to base a hiring upon. Regarding "industry experience": any situation which made you improving yourself is worth called experience and could positively influence your work.

Yes! Honestly I'd be very happy being declined a job where I failed their test or interview that directly reflected their business and working environment.

Exactly. The candidate doesn't even need to obviously succeed at the test, if they can explain how they're thinking about it as they go along. I don't think those "you've got 48 hours to write us an app to do X" projects or the multiple-choice tests some companies let you do remotely are much cop.