I suspect some of it is the terminology. If your job is mostly routine tasks in a lot of fields, you're usually called a technician (well, or a "genius" if you work at an Apple store). In Silicon Valley-style tech, computer scientist/programmer/developer have all been sort of munged together.

There are other areas where "engineer" is thrown around pretty liberally as well in the US. But title inflation in software is probably more pronounced than just about anywhere else.

Exactly. The standards are incredibly low. This can be a good and a bad thing.

Barriers to entry are very low which is great.

Senior is ten years +/- a year depending on what they accomplished in my opinion.

Your opinion is not the established nomenclature. Senior is widely understood to be 4 yr degree + 5 yrs experience. This means you have all the technical training plus enough professional experience to be considered fluent.

At ten years you should be absolutely expert in the areas you've worked in. This is staff or senior staff level, if you also have some business acumen, ie the ability to see beyond engineering requirements.

I don't really care what the established nomenclature is. I was stating what I consider senior and 5 years of industry experience doesn't cut it for me.

What's your experience cutoff for someone without a CS (or equivalent) undergrad degree? Or someone who has an unrelated undergraduate degree and spent 2 years getting a CS MS?