Relative to other fields. Compare it to wanting to switch careers into the military, plumbing, captaining a boat, or becoming a doctor or lawyer or civil engineer after the age of 40.
Technology has no age limits, educational requirements, no government enforced credentials or inspections required, no apprenticeship or residency requirements, no significant union presence, no commonality for time in title, no professional tests to pass, and a trivially small tool investment cost.
You can plausibly learn the craft to an employable level with just internet access, a couple hundred bucks in computer hardware, an insatiable amount of curiosity and desire to build things and the right personality match against the interview team. It's not a guarantee but the barriers to entry are laughably nonexistent compared to many careers.
Yeah, and it's still not easy, especially if you're talking about being in the higher income levels. It's also not enough to just enjoy learning and growing to get you there.
What we are discusing is the distorted view in the original comment. The original comment was comparing the top earners of one field to the median earners for another. It would be better to compare the medians. For example median dev salary is about $110k. Median physician salary is about $205k. So no, these are not comparably paying jobs. And one does not "easily" earn more than a physician simply by enjoying learning.
I have an employee right now with Bachelor of Art in Music whose career in music fizzled out making $190k today in software outside of SV. That's it. That's his software credentials. A physician lost far more money in life getting their degree and spends about that gap in pay in malpractice insurance and professional attire required to work in a hospital, and generally works more hours at a higher stress level.
Sorting by annual income, software developers are surrounded by more highly credentialed career options that are much harder to get into or are surrounded by similar paying roles that much more sparsely available per capita.
What sob story? Are those immediately adjacent roles physicians - no, they're making almost double nased on median hourly wage. There are many near that level that do not require extensive training, including ones that have sizable representation (look at all those manager positions, and FYI magistrates are near there and require no law degree, etc).
Had that person used nurses, PAs, etc, then they would have been correct. Those do have training requirements and make similar money.
FYI, that's the mean annual income. I'm talking about median (use the median hourly wage column).
It's more than that. It's the continuation of a distorted view of reality in which the world is a meritocracy and everyone can be rich if they just try hard enough. That's there's nothing stopping anyone from taking a job that doesn't require years of training and making 2x+ the median for that role and using just an anecdote to back it up. This type of stuff is detrimental to the choices and mental health of the next generation - expecting things that don't exist and then being crushed by reality.
It would be interesting to see what that looks like adjusted for location/COL. It's possible the comp due to cost of living with a high concentration of devs in one area might be enough to influence this. Until we understand that and compare it to the distribution for physicians, it would be hard to draw any conclusions from it.
Bay Area bias is almost certainly skewing this entire conversation thread. In my average non-coastal metro area, all the nice homes in the nice areas are owned by classes of people like lawyers and doctors, not software developers. Most developers I meet here drive average cars and live in average housing.
> Bay Area bias is almost certainly skewing this entire conversation thread
Definitely.
> In my average non-coastal metro area, all the nice homes in the nice areas are owned by classes of people like lawyers and doctors, not software developers.
Is the area benefiting from brain gain or suffering from brain drain?
I'm not sure how that can be true. I would expect the if there were demand for the higher quality devs then we would see them skewing the distribution locally (like on Glassdoor). There are certainly some higher paid devs in the distribution, but the overall distribution is lower than SV. If the demand is low, then I would also assume the pay would be lower.
> I would expect the if there were demand for the higher quality devs then we would see them skewing the distribution locally (like on Glassdoor).
Glassdoor or salary surveys aren't the most reliable source of information for outliers. There's a proportion of devs that are flying completely under the radar and who are completely invisible to most local companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0]. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally). When hiring is red hot, they might completely disappear from the hiring pool by junior year.
Something else to factor in is stock compensation. That probably won't be reflected in the BLS data.
What I've also been told is that due to the legal complexity of hiring international folks remotely, a lot of the people working remotely for US companies are legally contractor in their home country (so they would be reported in the local stats as self-employed and not necessary in the same category as other software devs).
There are alternatives, such as the military programs that will pay those bills for about an 8 year commitment.
But yes, I agree that being a programmer is better from an opportunity cost perspective. What I'm disagreeing with is the claim that devs make the same as docs. When looking at the medians, it's closer to half. If they had compared to to nurses or PAs, then it would be more appropriate.
Keep in mind almost all “salary” data I’ve seen for tech is just that, “salary”, it doesn’t include RSUs which begin to make up 50% or more of your TC which brings it to parity (or more) in your examples.
Someone else posted a link to actual income which still showed the median was about half. "Wages", according to the BLS, include bonuses and other comp. Stuff that vests or is deferred might not be counted. Even if it isn't, that's a small percentage of devs even earning them and wouldn't change the median much.
Real estate has licensing requirements, a national association you kinda need to participate in (MLS) and tons of regulatory requirements. I can't just wake up tomorrow and sell real estate.
The real estate exam is way easier than any IT interview. The MLS is a minor fee for access to the listing service. Tech has tons of regulatory requirements, some segments more than others. Most of the requirements for real estate are in the standard template already. Anything more difficult, and an agent will refer you to see a real estate attorney (much higher barrier to entry).
An easy way to look at this is how many real estate agents could be devs vs how many devs could be agents...
But those are all hurdles you must jump even if the skill required to do so is low. My dog groomer can fiddle with writing Excel formulas and then decide that tomorrow she wants to apply for an entry level software role, write a convincing resume and bullshit the right mix of interviewers well enough and literally nothing would stop her from making it through the application process or beginning an entry level job and turning that into a career if she was successful in the role. There is no standard or required process or governing body or common association or union or group to say who has what it takes to be a dev.
Tech can also have tons of regulatory requirements for the product or business but almost none exist for the employees themselves in the majority of jobs. You can hire a whole team of convicted felons that have never written a line of code into your software department, hand out the associate software engineer title to them and still pass most compliance, regulatory and audit requirements. It would probably be a dumb decision but nothing will stop me from calling them software developers and paying them as such and these roles are common (even if they don't pay entry level FAANG wages, they certainly pay living wages).
That doesn't make writing software easy, and doing nothing to set yourself up for success is going to lead to failure, stalling and washing out most of the time, but it's effectively a walk-on playing field of meritocracy in most cases.
Meritocracies don't exist, only the illusion for those that benefit.
Yes, it seems you're using the lowest theoretical barriers. That's fine. I'm talking about the common practical barriers. Of course our conclusions will differs.
Technology has no age limits, educational requirements, no government enforced credentials or inspections required, no apprenticeship or residency requirements, no significant union presence, no commonality for time in title, no professional tests to pass, and a trivially small tool investment cost.
You can plausibly learn the craft to an employable level with just internet access, a couple hundred bucks in computer hardware, an insatiable amount of curiosity and desire to build things and the right personality match against the interview team. It's not a guarantee but the barriers to entry are laughably nonexistent compared to many careers.