The pay is a combination of difficulty hiring, value added to the enterprise by the work, shortage of engineers, and market rates. Civil engineers make a lot l

The pay is a combination of difficulty hiring, value added to the enterprise by the work, shortage of engineers, and market rates. Civil engineers make a lot less since there are so many of them, yet they are still crucial for expensive projects. You only need a few to make a $30 million bridge, where with programmers you need more design and we aren't such a mature field. If programmers worked with purely physical items (well, some of them do), then the salaries would be a smaller percentage of the total.