It requires above average:
- Working memory capacity
- Tolerance to extreme frustration, persistence
- Ability to learn fast
- Capacity to deal with particularly high incidence of imposter syndrome
- I could keep going all day...
SE is not overpaid. I actually think it's underpaid. Above all, the profession pushes for an early retirement.
Literally all those traits you listed are needed as an EE(and in many other white collar and blue collar professions too) plus add even more scary stuff like advanced math (for PID tuning, system signal processing, system modelling and simulation, etc.), but for way less pay that even a kid making iOS apps who hasn't passed highschool math can out-earn you. So how is that fair? My example was a slight exaggeration, though I bet there are plenty of mobile app kiddies making more than EEs.
My point is not that SW devs and app kiddies are overpaid, but that in comparison to them, pretty much any other career is massively underpaid, even the related ones like EE, since the barrier of entry is higher and the pay is lower.
To wit, there was a highly popular and controversial topic on my country's subreddit where a youngster was asking half snarky, half serious: "What's the point of going to school, when I make 65k/year as a self taught web-dev without needing any of the useless knowledge I had to learn in school, while the people who go into professions where they actually do need that knowledge from school for their career (engineering, medical, farming, chemistry, nursing, etc.) can end up earning less than me, a school dropout and mediocre webdev?"
I taught myself systems engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and some chemistry. Most of these, I taught myself with low amount of investment, pirated books, pirated software, and garbage salvage.
I now work for the federal govt as a contractor making $150k/yr. The classes I took never even remotely got me here. I got me here.
Kid making iOS apps provides value to more people with almost no cost compared to EE working on his niche product and involving a bunch of other high cost components and capital investment to get to market.
Don't have a hard data to reference, it's just my personal, anecdotal observation.
Almost 50% of the people on the planet are technically above average. Not exactly a high bar to clear for something so well paid.
And it's not what I mentioned. I was talking about the original traits you mentioned. Most professions need those traits as well, web devs aren't that intellectually special as you might think, at least in Europe where plenty have access to free upper education.
I added advanced math, signal processing and control systems theory to show you the bar that EEs have, that many web devs couldn't clear as most web dev are just plumbing various flavor-of-the-month languages, frameworks and microservices together to parse a shitty JSON in AWS. Stuff that can be learned at home in a few months without studying engineering in University.
And I'm saying this with first hand experience, as an EE turned cloud dev. Web dev is basically overpaid when you look at how easy the bar is and how much money you make vs EE and other skilled careers that are the other way around in comparison. This goes double for my mechanical engineering friends who had to pass super difficult exams in university in terms of difficult math, CFD, structural analysis and simulations, all requiring very complex and domain specific knowledge only to get paid less than a Java dev. Do you think they are not above average?
I don't buy this. I think developers are highly paid because so many jobs are subsidized by VC speculation.
It's easy to get a software job working on a BS product that solves no real problems and eventually disappears. But the money you get paid is real enough in your bank account.
As long as VCs are willing to throw money at any random BS SaaS company that crops up, with the expectation that the losers are going to be outweighed by some unicorn, this will remain the case.
If/when the stock market corrects this free ride is going to be over.
(Disclaimer: I'm a developer, but I no longer work at a tech company)
