I'm working for a company that has provisions in its CLA for DECs. However they can only be hired if there is no qualified FO available for internal promotion. It is a remnant of a time around 7 years back when we had to hire several hundred DECs to continue the exponential growth the company was going through. Currently upgrade times are between 10 to 20 years depending in which of the three original companies that merged into this new one the FO in question started.
Nothing any of us can do about it, it is just a result of extremely bad management choices, however we have to managed to at least get our T&Cs up by a very wide margin, quite unlike those airlines that do not support a seniority system like for example FR. None of our FOs would even think about being a captain for something like 90k, simply not enough renumeration for the job.