Fraud detection, billing systems, infosec, banking, HFT, image/video processing and pattern recognition, games development, firmware, highload tools and service

Fraud detection, billing systems, infosec, banking, HFT, image/video processing and pattern recognition, games development, firmware, highload tools and services, tools for programmers (IDEs, linters, etc.), programming languages design, browsers, search systems, data processing and storage systems, electronic document management, cryptosystems, operating systems, frameworks, etc. It seems to me that this is a large part of the software being developed right now. And the development of all this requires rather non-trivial knowledge and skills. So your comparison with the race drivers is quite far from the truth.