My point is that if you go into your first job interview from college and say that you have 15 years experience then that's going to count against you because for right or wrong the question you're being asked is how many years have you been working in a professional work environment. By all means convince them of your passion, and explain that you've been doing awesome things with computers since forever. But "work experience" and "time from first exposure to computing" are two totally different things. Aside from that I agree with every thing you said.