But you have much lower education and time costs, no?
>In all, it takes about eight to ten years to become a professional engineer, depending on whether you decide to get a master's degree.
>Doctors must complete a four-year undergraduate program, along with four years in medical school and three to seven years in a residency program to learn the specialty they chose to pursue. In other words, it takes between 10 to 14 years to become a fully licensed doctor.
I'm a marketer. I hold a Master's and a couple of Graduate Diplomas. I have a professional designation that requires constant CPD. I spend a significant amount of my time undertaking professional development. I work longer hours and can make a good case that my work has more impact than engineers, and I get paid significantly less than engineers with similar tenure.
I can't see any reasonable argument that engineers are intrinsically worth more, (and I say that as a person that dropped out of Engineering to pursue other opportunities). There might be fewer (good ones) than what the market needs, and this obviously pushes salaries up.
Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects? I don't think you could even pass an internship interview if all you did was go to class for 4 years. (Passing the classes is of course predicated on doing a lot of programming outside of class, if only to have some text files to turn in!)
Most of the job training for this field comes from within. Hours, weeks, years alone with a computer. Nobody sees that, and you don't pay someone to administer it to you. But it's absolutely required.
Are you familiar with the medical pathway in the US? Software really isn't comparable for any but maybe the absolute most extreme developers.
1) Premed - 4 year degree + easily 1-2k+ hours spent volunteering, doing research, gaining medical work experience, obtaining LOR, shadowing, MCAT prep etc. This isn't optional if you actually want any chance of being accepted. Fail to get in and you're working with a (typically) biochem bachelors as a lab tech for $12 an hour and no upward mobility outside of grad school.
2) Medical School - another 4 years of pretty much nonstop studying outside mandated classwork and clinicals. Multiple large exams that basically dictate your entire future and whether you'll be able to match (ie. actually work as a doctor ever) along the way. A few thousand fail to match each year and invested 8 years + 250k med school + 50-100k undergrad to go back to that lab tech career I mentioned at $12/hr. Keep in mind those student loans are non-dischargable through bankruptcy.
3) Residency - 3-7 years. Family Medicine is one of the least rigorous and shortest at 3 years and averages about 10k hours of on the job during that time making less than minimum wage. Surgery is more like 80+ hours/week for much longer with 28 hour shifts standard at the start (minimum, better hope you don't have to finish any work at the end). Oh and don't fuck up because you literally have lives in your hands and face multi-million dollar lawsuits if you mess up after being awake for 20 hours straight on the job.
At the end of all of this and if you matched the most competitive specialties and busted your ass you might be able to make as much as a senior level SV software dev. Or you might be a pediatrician making 150k/yr if that appeals to you more than being wrist deep in someones bowels all day every day, or getting a 3 AM call to come do neurosurgery, or an urgent heart cath. Not feeling it tonight? Well someone is going to literally die if you aren't there within the next 30m- sleep well.
Well, I got my first for pay opportunity because a college about a hour and a half away from mine saw a HyperCard stack I wrote and posted on AOL - it was an improved Eliza clone. He wanted to integrate it into a HyperCard based Gopher server that was in 1994.
Then that led to an internship in 1995 at another company and I got a job there in 1996.
I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since then. The only reason I have any type of open source presence now is because my current job has a very straightforward open source process that allows us to get approved to put reusable artifacts from customer engagements on the corporate open source Github organization (https://github.com/aws-samples) under an MIT license.
That means I am free to fork it once it gets approved so it shows up on my own profile.
>In all, it takes about eight to ten years to become a professional engineer, depending on whether you decide to get a master's degree.
>Doctors must complete a four-year undergraduate program, along with four years in medical school and three to seven years in a residency program to learn the specialty they chose to pursue. In other words, it takes between 10 to 14 years to become a fully licensed doctor.