As someone in a similar position, I have a different take. I think SWE is compensated more highly for different reasons. I disagree that programming is any more

As someone in a similar position, I have a different take. I think SWE is compensated more highly for different reasons. I disagree that programming is any more difficult to learn than EE; I think it's pretty clear that they're broadly on the same tier and require similar (but not identical) skill sets. I think that only a small fraction of people are well suited to either. The biggest difference is that software is just closer to "the product". When something goes wrong on a typical embedded device, the first thing they say isn't "well, better bring in exmadscientist to redesign the board", it's "let's fix this in firmware". And so on and so forth. Most electrical projects just aren't, directly, the project. There's a big layer of software in between, and that software becomes the face of the product or even business and captures so much of the mindshare. The other big reason is simply that the complexity of software is unbounded. For me, there are only so many parts I can stuff onto a board. But software has no such limits. I was just looking at 2.5GbE Ethernet switch chips for a hobby project -- a hobby project -- and concluded that they weren't bad at all and would take me somewhere around 40 hours to deal with, start to finish. That's for one of the nastier things around in your typical consumer environment (short of a 5GHz CPU) and represents a tremendous amount of investment on so many levels to get things to be not only possible, but down to the level that a seniorish engineer can just do it that quickly. In contrast, a dinky web interface to manage the stupid thing would also probably be around 40 hours (less if crappy, way more if done "to modern standards"). Which is kind of insane, when you think about how many Gbps SERDES links are in each project! But software can do whatever it feels like, while the hardware side necessarily has constraints on it, so this is what we get. However, I also think things are pretty imbalanced right now: SWE is somewhat overpaid, and will correct down over time. So it's not a great career to leverage the farm against, though I'd say it's never going to pay worse than EE or ME.