@chris In the early 00s, it was pretty easy to get to senior fairly quickly. A lot of us with little-to-no formal computer science training ended up as the senior-most people building web things, which isn’t a bad thing; CS degrees didn’t yet teach what we knew, and there were no “software engineering” degrees. At the time, the only way to “advance” was to switch to management. I’m glad the industry finally solved this by introducing the IC track, as well as slowing down promotions.