Most people won't have a 40 year career in a high paying industry like software engineering in silicon valley.

A huge amount of people in high paying positions don't stick it out for 40 years straight. People become burnt out, have kids, live off savings/their partner, or just pay off their mortgage and live an lower-stress life. Sometimes people die, get long term sick, retire early or retrain. Or they hit a glass ceiling and don't want to keep pushing against it and quit.

I meet a number of people at Apple in this category (i.e 20-30 years + experience). At a certain point salary tends to flatten out unless you go into management or do something incredibly specialized.

I would honestly be fine with this, as long as the salary plateau was high enough to comfortably do all the upper-middle-class life things (homeownership, put kids through college, take a couple of vacations a year, etc).

Trouble is, the current plateaus are still too low to even contemplate homeownership, unless you want to commit 2/3rds of your paycheck to housing costs.

Why do these engineers not switch jobs? Wouldn't inflation actually reduce what they are earning if their salaries do flatten out?

Switch to where? There are hardly any 6 figure professions out there that don’t require a significant amount of training and sacrifice in the early years.

Doesn't matter. They lived in the golden age, they had a long time to buy their house when they were much more affordable. They have no renting problem.

Not to mention that apple pays well and has good benefits, so they are not sacrificing anything by staying, quite the opposite.

I worked on the core audio team. It’s kind of hard to find another company that pays as well as Apple where you get to continue doing that kind of work. The only other companies I can think of are either lab126 (Amazon) or google. Lab126 doesn’t pay as well as Apple.

Also, apples 401k match and internal stock discounts are amazing.

This isn't unique to tech. My father has almost 40 years in medicine and his salary hasn't gone up beyond inflation/cost of living in at least 20 years.

Because most of them can't. Only so many of senior engineers can become managers (because of obvious mathematics, management is a much smaller fraction of overall jobs available). Most of them get to a point their salaries flatten out and there isn't any advancement they can do. At that point that usually have paid off mortgage and kids so they are content just having better work life balance, doing 9-5 work & collecting their paycheck, not caring too much about advancing from that sweet spot.

Maybe you won't find people in their 60s working in the startup scene, but that doesn't mean they just drop out of their career, which you seem to imply. Most just go to work in established companies. I work with plenty of people over 60.

> have kids

Is there any data showing that full-time working engineers with children make/work less than childless ones?

Is that true though? Can't comment for SF tech, but developers in the manhattan financial sector (at least at the high end of things at least as well paid with similar stresses) tend to measure tenure in decades.

Yeah their senior role sounds like a SDE2 at Amazon or Microsoft (61-62?)

This is the biggest problem I've faced. I can't put down Senior SE despite holding the title (which is verified by calling the company) because the technical skill expectations fluctuate MADLY across geographical areas and companies.

If you are moving from a low-skill tech area to a high-skill tech area, there's been a lot of wasted time discussing how I moved from a more "primitive" state in the US to a more "modern" one (not my words, but said directly to my face).

But I'm left holding the bag since I left that other company. And staying out of the workforce to get involved locally and learn new skills is its own risk.

I wish my employer had an Engineer 3 position. I'm on track to be promoted out of Engineer 2, which will make me "senior" with two years of experience on a single team. It seems farcical. It seems unlikely that I'd hold up to any other company's expectations for "senior." I'm not wild about obfuscating my title, and I'd guess that a prospective employer isn't wild about hiring someone into a lower level.

I recently went through the Triplebyte process and can confirm. I went SDE2@MS -> SDE2@AMZN, but my Triplebyte offers (and others outside of the big 5) were for Senior roles.

It seems more like they simply don't have enough data for more senior engineers.

They're taking into account the ageism that occurs in SV.

Around here, "senior" is 20+ years in the business.

People may have careers lasting 40 years but that hasn't been the case in Silicon Valley for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Indeed outside of a few professions, I doubt this is the case anywhere. A gold watch and an office retirement party is the stuff of a bad Mad Men episode.

They aren't talking about 1 company. They are talking about 1 career.

Many, (most?) people certainly have 1 career for 40 years.