FWiW I did a pure applied mathematics degree + half an actual engineering course (it got too easy so I transfered to math as they were letting students work directly on control systems for robots rather than rote bookwork).

Four years after graduation, with four years coding experience on things both numerical and symbolic I transferred into a geophysics position developing software for signal aquistion (from sat, sea, air, and ground units), processing, projection, interpretation (this was before Keyhole + google maps | google earth so the group was also writing their own world scale mapping software (late 80s | early 90s)).

Long story short, I had similar experience levels to Hamiliton at that time and I was very definitely a Jr on the team as everybody else had way more eperience than I did.

I guess such things are relative.