At my last several employers, people would go from associate/junior/entry/whatever directly to senior. Usually within 1-2 years from coming out of college (sometimes 2 years-ish out of coding bootcamp for particularly bright folks).
That meant basically everyone was Senior if they weren't fresh out of school. And then getting to the next step up (which had various names... Lead, Principal, Staff, level 3, whatever), is always excruciatingly hard, because it's where people start expecting more than "We didn't fire you for 2 years" and actually look at performance, and there's no title in between.
I've seen companies promote people to senior from being out of school without internships in just a few months, then need 7-10 years of experience to get to the next level. For anyone who actually cares about career tracks, that seriously kills it.
Super Senior
Geriatric
Señor
in many ways, that's the whole problem with this conversation: coding doesn't have much room for professional advancement, because 99% of the available work can be done by inexperienced kids.
* CI/CD * Docker Registry * Testing Pipeline * Self hosting option * I'm sure there's more
So I don't think you are being fair here.
PS: I'm not affiliated in any way with Gitlab, just an user
Arguing that an open-source project is cloning multiple pre-existing projects doesn't make the software any more innovative.
Coding is like 30% of a developer's job. And I'm being generous.
If you think that my estimate is not totally out of whack, that leaves all people with a 4 year degree hitting this level before they are 30 (assuming they start out in this field).
If this is "senior", in what way do you expect your employees to improve in the next 35 years of their career (assuming they retire at 65)? And what title would that have?