Well "elders" are the people who have been there for the most amount of time, so if the industry has >30 year veterans wandering around then the elders will have around that much experience. But the learning in an industry is generally logarithmic where most of the lessons get picked up in the first 1-3 years and then after that there are only occasional new things to pick up.

If anything software seems to be unusually favourable to experience because the first 5 years of learning how to think like a computer is so punishing.