Twenty years ago I was promoted to "senior" three months out of university, for the adhoc purpose of improving the number of senior developers on our pitch to clients.

On the other hand, that was the dotcom era. The number of people writing software simply exploded, as did the available technologies. The entire traditional way of doing things was simply obsoleted, multiple times over. A 21 year old Finnish student had released an operating system that contravened the textbooks and went on to change the world. A 21 year old dropout invented the entire genre of 3D video games. The largest software company in the world was run by a Harvard dropout. It was really impossible to overstate the extent to which credentials were meaningless and results were everything in the dotcom era. And that still affects the culture today.

> between 6-8 years to become a senior engineer

If you follow that timeline, there would be plenty of people who were millionaires and on their second or third startup board before reaching "senior".

Now, not everybody is a Gates or a Carmack or a Torvalds, although the industry has not quite adapted to this fact and still tries to hire as if they were. But we have to recognise that the timescales are simply very different from mechanical engineering, and that the industry is still very much being disrupted from below.

Oh, and none of those prodigies are millenials.