Ability is a combination of aptitude, skills, persistence, and exposure. More importantly, intention matters and it show up in the quality of your work. If the intention is to cut corners, no one can stop you from doing shoddy work. Number of years and titles do not matter much if the other parameters are low.

Aptitude paves the way for exploration: learning languages, paradigms, modeling techniques, discovering gotchas and so on. Skills follow from practice and practice requires a tough mindset where you don't give up easily.

So many software engineers learn to code just to pass exams and interviews. They claim they have strong logical reasoning. However, they have only been exposed to ideas and patterns from competitive programming rut. They have never even seen code more complex than a few hundred lines. They haven't seen problems being modeled in different languages. They haven't had the regret of building complex software without enough design. They have not had the disappointment of overengineering solutions. They have never reverse-engineered legacy code. They have never single-stepped in a debugger. All they have learned is to make random changes until "It works on my machine".

Yes, software is complex, disposable, ever-changing and often ugly but that is no excuse for keeping it that way.

A coworker had this anecdote decades ago.

There's a difference between 10 years of experience and 1 year of experience 10 times.

YOE isn't always a measurement of quality, you can work the same dead-end coding job for 10 years and never get more than "1 year" of actual experience.

I've job hopped a bit. I've gone from junior to senior to lead to mid-level to staff to senior. I have ten years experience.

My career trajectory is wild. At this rate I'll be CTO soon, then back to mid-level.

Titles in of themselves are meaningless, I've seen a kid hired straight from uni into a "senior" position lol

Title inflation?