I understand where this guy is coming from, but his instinct to say that tougher career paths should elicit more compensation is misguided. Certainly there is s

I understand where this guy is coming from, but his instinct to say that tougher career paths should elicit more compensation is misguided. Certainly there is some correlation, but he could have added social workers and teachers to his list, but nobody wonders why those two professions don’t make a lot of money. You can sort of count on most organizations paying something resembling a cost of living salary (though even that is becoming less true), but after that everything, ever-y-thing, always, is market driven. We get to have our cake and eat it too, not because it is harder to become a software engineer than a doctor, but because it also isn’t trivial to become one AND the demand for our talents keeps outstripping supply every year. There are still lots of divisions at lots of Fortune 500s that are just now starting their journey in adopting software to solve their problems, and they all create market pressure somewhere in the supply curve. Look at medicine. Doctors make less than they used to because cost controls (not very effective ones, but still) have been introduced into the system. So even though demand for doctors is high a doctor can only generate so much revenue for a provider. The demand for a service only roughly correlates to a markets ability to pay for it. There is a ton of demand for services in our economy that go unmet, because the market can’t or won’t bear the cost. Edit: Also, the returns software can generate for an organization are simply astronomical in a way that even other engineering fields can’t rival. If an organization is embarking on a software project that they know will either make or save them 10s of millions of dollars they aren’t really going to bat an eyelash at 300k a year.