Having worked a bunch of other jobs, SWE is an order of magnitude mentally harder than most other jobs. It's like being a translator, poet, detective, and puzzle solver all at once. And you have to do it all collaboratively with a team of other strong-willed, high IQ, low EQ teammates. With weekly deadline pressure. And management who thinks it's taking too long.
Of course my cousin who is a lawyer at Cravath works like 3x more hours harder than I do. She gets paid like 2.5x more too. They just hire tons of people and let the job weed out the bad ones. Most engineering teams can't do that because we're not trying to squeeze 100 hours a week of work out of our engineers.
Of course, plenty of teams do basic work. But plenty of teams with even basic sounding work have to handle an absolutely huge amount of complexity.
Of course my cousin who is a lawyer at Cravath works like 3x more hours harder than I do. She gets paid like 2.5x more too. They just hire tons of people and let the job weed out the bad ones. Most engineering teams can't do that because we're not trying to squeeze 100 hours a week of work out of our engineers.
Of course, plenty of teams do basic work. But plenty of teams with even basic sounding work have to handle an absolutely huge amount of complexity.