Arguably you are totally correct in that assertion of relative value to society. It may actually be the case too, on average, in the US. Note a quick google sea

Arguably you are totally correct in that assertion of relative value to society. It may actually be the case too, on average, in the US. Note a quick google search says theres 1M doctors in the US and the average salary is somewhere in the $250-400K range depending on source. Meanwhile Google also returns me "The average salary for a Software Engineer is $117654 per year in United States." - Indeed. Allegedly there's 4M of us weirdos here too. When we get out of the staff engineer FAANG & Wall St tech bubble the $250k/500k/1M TC numbers don't really exist. And there's only so many seats within the bubble making those numbers anyway, what maybe 50-100K total out of a country of 4M SWEs. Plenty of SWEs on Wall St never make more than $250k before "getting retired" (in the Bladerunner sense). Likewise most SWEs working in Fortune 500 companies are clearly barely entering the six figure TC range.