To be fair, in the 70s it was much harder to be productive as an engineer. You weren't writing javascript, you were writing fotran, or cobol, or assembly code,

To be fair, in the 70s it was much harder to be productive as an engineer. You weren't writing javascript, you were writing fotran, or cobol, or assembly code, or C. Everything was much less "standard" than it was today, from processor instruction sets to compilers to system calls to source control, etc. It took A LOT of work to understand all the arcane knowledge and become productive. Nowadays, you can read some books, deploy your code to AWS where it runs with 99.99999999% x-platform consistency. The benchmark of being a senior engineer is not "p85 engineer" its "has demonstrated ability to deliver value at specified scope" and its just takes less time to learn everything you need to do that now. Can a person with 3 years XP be a senior? No, they can be a sophomore (think they know it all but mess everything up), but do you need 15 years experience to be a true senior, no you do not.