I have five years more "professional" experience, seems to be the difference - I had verifiable coding experience on open-source projects before that that would have demonstrated those skills. I've got more confident in my judgement but I'm not at all convinced that judgement has actually improved.
I stuck to the JVM (since people seem willing to pay more if you have experience on the specific stack, and my first job happened to be Java); for the last 3-4 years I've been doing almost exclusively Scala.
