The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, I suppose.
Yes, compensation is vastly better as a software developer, _if_ you don't mind working on uninteresting rubbish in a stultifying business environment for your entire career, which is what the vast majority does. Even if you decide to value money over intellectual stimulation (I won't judge; having creature comforts is indeed comforting), there's no guarantee that compensation is going to stay that nice forever; people are literally flooding into software and that's bound to drive wages down at some point.
Personally, I'd give a lot to be in academia; I'm damned sick of the rat race.
There's very stressful competition in academia, especially in early academic careers, so depending on the place and person the experience could be stultifying as well. You could also work on uninteresting (or at least unimportant) rubbish in academia, or you could work on interesting stuff that doesn't deliver; in either case you're heavily published for that. No one gives a damn about "ten years of experience" if you weren't producing quality papers on a regular basis within that period (actually, in that case ten years of experience might be worse than no experience).
> that's bound to drive wages down at some point.
Yeah. But at least in my field, the pay is guaranteed to suck in the early career (we're talking close to a decade here), and won't get that much better afterwards, assuming you're successful. Kinda hard to fall that low.
I guess it does boil down to grass greener on the other side of the fence for the most part.
Yes, compensation is vastly better as a software developer, _if_ you don't mind working on uninteresting rubbish in a stultifying business environment for your entire career, which is what the vast majority does. Even if you decide to value money over intellectual stimulation (I won't judge; having creature comforts is indeed comforting), there's no guarantee that compensation is going to stay that nice forever; people are literally flooding into software and that's bound to drive wages down at some point.
Personally, I'd give a lot to be in academia; I'm damned sick of the rat race.