Mid-career means somewhere near the middle of your career. If you expect to work from age ~23 to ~65, the middle is around age 44. (Edit: if you start work at age 18, the middle is still over age 41.) Age 28 is much closer to the beginning of your career than the middle. Even if you retire at 50, the middle of your career is still in your mid-30s.
I am inclined to agree with you, but tech has two peculiar distinctions:
First, tech changes so fast that we end up having many "mini-careers" instead of a long one.
Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons), companies think there is not that much of a difference between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.
> First, tech changes so fast that we end up having many "mini-careers" instead of a long one.
This is where senior engineers have an opportunity to shine. Knowing not to pick up every shiny object, being able to draw parallels between many different projects, etc. all matter. For shipping software, just as it's possible to draw on lessons across tech stacks, it's also possible to apply lessons from entirely different paradigms (e.g. Windows desktop vs Web vs mobile).
The risk here is the apocryphal interview question of whether an engineer has 15 times of 1 year of experience or 15 years of experience. Mini-careers are better.
> Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons), companies think there is not that much of a difference between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.
Ageism is definitely a thing. However, I can attest that companies can understand the difference if you are able to communicate it effectively. Again, remember that in the scheme of things that a person with 5-7 years of experience is new to the field. If you have 15 years of meaningful experience, you should be able to differentiate from someone who does not, in a way that matters to the hiring firm.
The bigger hurdle in mid-career is that where a firm may be frequently hiring juniors due to higher turnover and the general need by many teams to have fewer experienced engineers than juniors, they may not hire senior folks as frequently. So the job search to find an real senior role will take longer. This is not unique to tech; the dynamics are broadly similar to other professional fields.
The bottom line is that $200k at non-tech firms in major US cities is by no means a comp range for a mid-career engineer that requires one to be especially noteworthy in the field.
Mid-career means somewhere near the middle of your career. If you expect to work from age ~23 to ~65, the middle is around age 44. (Edit: if you start work at age 18, the middle is still over age 41.) Age 28 is much closer to the beginning of your career than the middle. Even if you retire at 50, the middle of your career is still in your mid-30s.