First, I wish we'd talk more about comp in terms of a tuple of (person, company). There are many companies that will never pay above a certain amount for software because even great software devs just don't move the needle for the business. So I think it's as much a question of where one works as the person's individual characteristics.

Second, our industry is really young. Average years of experience is what, like, 6? It's because the industry has grown so rapidly over the past decade. We have the demographics of a country like India. Compare this to an older field like architecture, law, or medicine--they've had a lot more time to work out the industry-wide division of labor between entry-level, mid, and very senior. The commercial software industry is maybe 40 years old, we're just starting to figure this out now.

I think overall the industry just doesn't know how to use very senior people. It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well, how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully). We're a very youthful, faddish bunch and I think it's to everyone's detriment.

(Background: 10+ year experience, 35-year old software dev here, who's married to an architect that builds buildings, and works with a lot of people over 50)