Certainly, the variance between engineers is huge and can offset experience.

Over time, though, the bad older engineers get managed out of the profession, or leave out of frustration or lack of satisfaction, so you end up having fewer. The selection function for good engineers has had much longer to run on them.

Think of experience as a trend line which pushes everyone to be better relative to what they were. School teaches algorithms, languages, tools, but it doesn't teach things like engineering approaches and how to keep a team productive, which doesn't always mean the most awesome algorithms. School teaches how to get the "correct" answer, experience teaches how to get "good enough" in a short amount of time. You need both!

About algorithms: It very much depends on the thing one works on, whether one ever needs to look up what a good algorithm is for a problem, which needs solving. Often it is more about how to put pieces together, using APIs, building an API, making a service, etc. Similar for data structures. For most you only need to know the basics like when to use a hash table, when to use an array or whatever of the data structures that are often available anyway in the standard library of the language.

This even more diminishes the gains that engineers get from their expert knowledge.

Usually only when in a position to develop something ground up, does the expert knowledge of data structures and algorithms come into play.

Algorithm and data structure questionaires rather seem like mathematics in many cases. A filter to weed out people, but not often of use at the job.

Obviously I might be biased due to personal experience.

Single data point. It doesn't prove or disprove anything. I have seen 60 yo folks jump on a project and literally turn it around in weeks.

> I was surprised and dumbfounded how much better I was than my peers

Self-Humbled

Not really, I really expected to be very lacking in experience and aptitude. I did poorly in school and I have really bad ADHD and Tourette’s. My expectations as an engineer were to do well enough to keep a job; never expected I’d be a natural at writing software.