They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten This sounds about correct for a single role. A good senior person will have at leas

They don't understand that after 3-5 years the diminishing returns flatten This sounds about correct for a single role. A good senior person will have at least a few different roles under their belt too, each one of those takes another 3-5 years to flatten out, and usually at least a couple tech stacks they've been deeply in. Having multiple repeats of the same year's experience never helps anyone, whether it's 2 years or 20. But 10-15 years of good experience puts you far ahead of 5. The old joke about this had to do with learning to differentiate between 10 years experience, and the same year of experience, 10 times.