I think a lot of this stems from the way Software Development, as a practice, is evolving almost as quickly as Computer Science is (or at least there is a perce

I think a lot of this stems from the way Software Development, as a practice, is evolving almost as quickly as Computer Science is (or at least there is a perception that it is evolving). Bridges are built largely the same way as they were 100 years ago. Software built today looks different from software built 10 years ago. So when a hiring manager sees a software engineer with 25 years of experience, they can basically ignore the first 10-15 years as irrelevant. Imagine someone who has spent the last 25 years learning everything there is to know about SQL Databases. They aren't going to do very well in a lot of environments today with NoSQL all over that have only been around en masse for ~10 years. Maybe that hiring manager is wrong. Maybe he's not. The engineers with 5 years experience have the same keywords the hiring manager is looking for on their resume as the engineer with 25 years experience. Maybe they aren't really as adept, but since we seem to be unable to really get a good reliable measure on skill, the difference between those engineers looks very small on paper. The project is likely to turn out the same at the end of the day anyway. So when you do the math at the end of the day, the more junior engineers look like a better deal (and they really might be).