This doesn’t ring true to me, especially for an ME which is one of the broadest disciplines. I know one who had a BS and has worked in construction on building automation and energy systems, automotive robotics, healthcare as a process engineer, aerospace software, and finally as a data scientist.

I think it's a mindset that people "get" trapped. I know many engineers who are trapped, but it was their own doing, they never tried to avoid the trap and have never worked hard to get out from it. It's a mindset, it's easy to fall into. You get paid well enough, things are stable, you become an expert within a company or industry, and you feel valued when your expertise is found to be important. If you don't work to get yourself out of that trap, to expand your own value and knowledge, then you get stuck both in a job and in a salary range. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes it's a horrible experience, it all depends on what the person is striving for.

I've worked with many people who were realistically less than 5 years from retirement, most of them were "trapped" but this was often by design. They knew they could ride out the next 5 years getting paid pretty well, having low stress, and the stability of this ensured that they'd hit their retirement financial numbers. Sometimes younger engineers fall into this trap, and that's when it's sad, often they don't even realize it and no one tells them.

Funny, I was duped once into coming to a Herbalife-similar Multi-Level-Marketing introduction meeting by a university colleague (we both did EE). He called some other people from our class saying it was a "business opportunity". The constant pestering for us to buy stuff burned him some bridges. He obviously couldn't adapt to new technologies and realities.

In Latin America there's also a meme that lots of engineers have become Uber drivers. I have definitely chatted with more than a handful that were engineers. All of them said they hated programming classes too much during university, so they won't try to change to SE now, or to anything really.

I graduated as EE but immediately became SE. Ironically I also doubt that I could go back into being an EE now, so I'm also a bit "trapped".

> Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and government who have legacy mainframe or middleware skills.

Well, a lot of people warn of those, but you were one of the naive people who believed throwing your career on rusty crap was a way of "never ending unemployed" or you thought banks for some reason were the best technological choice option then I guess those are the consequences of your actions (not to mention the mental toll)