And this is why you lie on your entry level resumes kids.
I then went ahead and hired another guy with literally zero job experience, but with interesting academic pursuits and who contributed to Compiz. Guy turned out to be amazing.
Don't lie. If a company won't listen to you because you don't have an arbitrary number of years of experience in your CV (what's this, the aviation industry?), then it is not a company you want to be talking to anyway.
EDIT: I should have said "Don't lie during the technical interview"
For technical interviews though, it depends on how deep the interviewer will want to probe. Banking that they won't care or don't know their stuff is not really a winning strategy.
People may overlook some of the job requirements (many interviewers won't even look at what's written in the job offer itself!). They will not look the other way if they catch you lying, even if it about something that's of no consequence for the job. You get branded as not trustworthy from the get go.
Jailbreakers figured out how to build native apps almost immediately, so it's not impossible. But it sounds like that's not what he was talking about.
Do not treat the years of experience as a barrier to entry.
Perhaps lying to get past the know-nothings in HR is acceptable. Probably not a good idea to lie to tech people you would work with.
My bane!
I swear. I've been doing some form of programming since I was a kid, and as a hobby and moonlighting for more like 10 years, and professionally for a notable company for a few years and I still get automatic responses (* rejections) from HR within hours or a couple of days with 99% of the applications I send out with a generic message full of platitudes. And from any size: small startups to multi-national conglomerates. If I hear anything at all.
They also wanted to see your experience. So the first thing they do before an interview is a audition. You're sat down, on prem, (sys ad job) with Windows 2012 server, IIS, MSSQL, and a toy app. You have to make it work. They record the screencap, and review it as a team to see how you perform the job.
Frankly, I love how this place works and gets things done. Roadblocks are a thing, like all jobs.. But some of these are from those much higher up. But communication and support of your coworkers is absolutely amazing.
But the other thing, I work now in a regulated space. I knew that going in (3 good friends work there as well). Lying on my resume would not be, uhh, good :) There's these nice guys and ladys in suits who specialize in a wee more stringent background checks.
My problem has been getting past the gatekeepers to get to that point—any face-to-face.
Though in my current role, I'll say they were happy after speaking to me and discovering I had heard and was familiar enough with their solution to have fiddled around with the platform outside of a professional context. In spite of my amateur knowledge of it, it seemed to be the distinguishing factor in my interview... just not until I actually got past the gatekeepers— in what increasingly seems like a game of chance! :P
Beyond disqualifying yourself, there's not much in terms of risk and the reward (getting your career off the ground) is quite good, especially when faced with writing >200 job applications.
Easy solution: distinguish the stuff that you have "exposure" or "light experience" or whatever (translation: I screwed around with Django for a weekend) from the stuff that you are actually claiming serious experience with ("I've built multiple apps in this technology, successfully submitted a patch to their dev branch, and if pressed could quote various parts of its documentation"). Result: filters and HR people check whatever boxes they need to, and any remotely competent technical person sees what you're actually saying. No lying necessary.