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It means they haven't really grown through their 7 years to do more advanced things and work on more complex projects.

Adding features to the average business CRUD app on a LAMP stack for seven years straight is a lot different than applying your skills and energy to things like distributed systems, bigger scale projects, learning better abstractions and design patterns, etc.

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Actually, as I've seen it used, it usually is an alternate way of saying "that person is a job-hopper." The actual work on the resume is less relevant to a person using this phrase, usually, in my experience, than that they have had "sticking power" to stay with a given project through multiple phases (development, maintenance, etc.).

For me it actually means the same thing over and over. Had a guy with "15 years" of experience interview one time. He analyzed scientific data, sounded good. When we got into it he'd literally been writing/managing a parser in perl for a data sent with only minor changes. He did this for 15 years. Terrific waste of time. That guy was what I meant. He'd solved a specific set of problems over and over and never grown beyond that.

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