Programmers Should Plan for Lower Pay?
Wage isn’t based on the difficulty of the job.<p>Wage is based on the opportunity cost of the uncaptured labor value incurred due to employment. For software engineering, this is acute since with the same skills needed for employment one can make a competing enterprise to their employer and capture all the value.<p>Other professions require you to have large capital to do so, so the opportunity cost is either non-existent if you cannot access that capital or further discounted by the financing cost/risk.<p>Your end SWE wage ends up being the value you would otherwise be able to capture discounted to the expected value w.r.t your risk.<p>Companies profit on employment by having a lower risk in enterprising, thus a better EV, than their employees in the same enterprise for a given number of reasons—brand, preexisting customer base, speed, proprietary market analytics, etc.