That also neglects the quality of those 5 years of experience as it relates to the actual position. 5 years of designing financial services systems is more valu

That also neglects the quality of those 5 years of experience as it relates to the actual position. 5 years of designing financial services systems is more valuable to a financial services company than 5 years of building web applications for a dating company. That is the problem I have with collective bargaining in higher skilled fields — it assumes people are interchangeable based on worthless “years of experience” metrics. Some sysadmin with 20 year experience might not know the first thing about DevOps, while a fresh college graduate might be an expert. Yet the 20 year guy would get paid more despite knowing less.