Like any other role the experience of a tester is going to very greatly from person to person depending on what their experience and background is. For me I currently work for a small company that develops their own internal software to support their operations.
My current role is to provide testing support for about 80 percent of our operational software. I do this through a combination of exploratory testing, grey box techniques and automation. I have become increasingly technical over the last few years to the point of becoming a halfway decent programmer (I won't claim anything further than that.. )
The good part about my role is that I have my fingers in a number of different apps and get to drive how testing is done on those. The drawbacks for my particular type of role is that I have very little support as far as other testers with in my own organization to bounce ideas off of or to off load work to when I become overloaded. I get to work very closely with the developers helping to define the features, identify risks and downstream impacts. I review code, and I nothing makes me smile like being told "YOU SUCK!" by some of my devs when I pass them a nasty bug (they of course mean it in the best possible way). Testing can be a fun and challenging career.
If you are interested in a career path in testing I would encourage you to do some reading. There are lots of resources out there. I would encourage you to take a look at some of the following.
There are many other folks and schools of thought about what testing is so keep digging.