Unlike law and medicine, software engineering has yet to setup it's own guild that works to maintain its high salaries by gatekeeping entry into the profession

Unlike law and medicine, software engineering has yet to setup it's own guild that works to maintain its high salaries by gatekeeping entry into the profession with endless hoops to jump through and student loans to laden yourself with. It's relatively meritocratic and in many cases you don't even need a degree at all if you can otherwise prove you can do the work. Sometimes those people are even better than the degree holders who may have just been really good at checking boxes in school rather than learning. Don't worry though, I think quite a few in the field now are ready and willing to start pulling up the ladder they elevated their lives with.