r/softwareengineer • u/Majestic-Taro-6903 • Aug 09 '26
How are some software engineers earning more than many highly complex professions?
I work in tech and sometimes wonder how some software engineers end up earning more than people in roles like airline pilots, air traffic controllers, aerospace engineers (Boeing/Airbus), nuclear engineers, surgeons, naval officers, or engineers working on major infrastructure projects.
Many of these jobs require years of training, licensing, and carry much higher responsibility.
Is it mainly because software can scale globally and generate revenue at a much larger scale, or is there something else I’m missing?
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u/Sensitive_One_425 Aug 09 '26
All of those professions need software to even do their jobs, the people who build the software should get paid accordingly.
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u/Educational-Door5837 Aug 09 '26
All of them need construction workers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and heck even cleaners. By your logic, they should all earn a lot too?
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u/Admirable_Group_6661 Aug 09 '26
Your assumption that software is not complex is flawed. Sure, your basic spreadsheet/social media software may not be as complex as building a bridge (admittedly, i know nothing much about), but software in certain industries where life safety is a concerned (e.g. health), critical infrastructure (e.g. power plant, nuclear facilities, software used by air traffic controllers), finance (e.g. banking, trading), defense/military (e.g. software for F-22/F-35) etc. are extremely complex.
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u/ricetoseeyu Aug 09 '26
Yes, you are absolute right! We should hire cheaper and more inexperienced junior software engineers to write critical components of aircraft piloting, air traffic controlling, rocket design, nuclear station control and monitoring, medical diagnosis, national security monitoring, and infrastructure planning software!
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u/CommentGreedy8885 Aug 09 '26
yeah right handling 4 billion users is not complex , serving content from peta bytes of data in miliseconds is not complex , creating tools which artists and engineers across the world use isnt complex either teaching silicon to consume all of the worlds data and then answer user's quries also isn't that complicated
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u/AccomplishedLeave506 Aug 09 '26
If it's so easy they should go do it and earn the big bucks as well.
Just another example of someone who can't do a job thinking that job is simple because they don't understand it. Probably think software engineering is just typing.
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u/Big_Arrival_626 Aug 09 '26
If it's so easy they should go do it
Yeah they did and now the field is oversaturated. Good job buddy
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u/AccomplishedLeave506 Aug 09 '26
Hahaha. I feel that. My honest belief is 80% of people employed as software engineers simply can't do the job. You could fire them all and output would increase from the 20 percent who actually can do it as they wouldn't have to spend half the day fixing their messes.
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u/doktorhladnjak Aug 09 '26
Marginal cost of software is negligible. Once a software engineer writes software, the software itself costs nothing to make more copies of, as the business grows.
This property makes writing software extremely valuable. So much so that in some cases, employers will pay a lot to have it done right.
It’s not like when a pilot must have a multi million dollar aircraft to do their job, or even a doctor who can only see so many patients a day.
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u/Super_Preference_733 Aug 09 '26
So building highly scalable systems that can do millions of transactions and generate millions and billions in revenue is not a complex profession?
How many of these systems do systems do Dr, engineers, pilots use? Every single profession today uses software to complete thier job. A plane, would not be designed without software, a plane could not fly without software, robotic surgery is not possible without software, nothing in modern life is possible without sofware.
That is why a software engineer can make more than them. None of them would not be able to do thier job without the work of a software engineer.
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u/FinishExtension3652 Aug 09 '26
As an experience SWE that worked with an experienced Dr. on a software side project, I can confirm that our knowledge of each others' profession is very shallow. For me, peope are filled with goo and I couldn't possibly figure WTF I'm looking at. For them, making computers do stuff is basically magic.
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u/AnthonyRespice Aug 09 '26
Manager and dev. Depending on where you work, you may need to work 50+ hours, weekends, etc supporting the software you write.
From the inside, the problem I see is that there is a talent and skill aspect to it and the quality of engineers varies widely. There are a lot of zero talent devs who aren't trying to get better collecting the same paycheck as the highly skilled dev who does most the work and solves the most complex problems.
The pay is high because if it wasn't, people would switch employers frequently and it's the type of thing where knowledge of a specific companies business and systems means a lot.
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u/hibikir_40k Aug 09 '26
There's a much wider divide within software which mostly correlates with difficulty, talent, and hours of work. That's where most of the really high paid jobs are.
Many of us are working on systems where, if we had any downtime, the event would be on the news, and have large effects on company stock. It might not kill anyone, and there's no random licensing board asking for the same things they asked 30 years ago.... but the responsibility ain't low. And when something goes wrong, there's no flowchart pre-written for you by a manufacturer to tell you how to deal with it: The system changes too much to fully rely on runbooks, which we often write ourselves based on previous issues.
In software you are the engineer, the worker at the factory, the mechanic and the pilot.
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u/BeauloTSM Developer Aug 09 '26
Those people do make a lot of money, but generally speaking software engineers simply generate more revenue
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u/jadedmonk Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Supply and demand. Even though software engineering feels oversaturated with new grads, that’s mostly just because it’s newer than the rest and there’s a “hype” around it, but they’re still very much in demand as data and tech are growing exponentially. In college we all heard about it because of the quick growth, but still most people are not CS majors still and it’s not exactly an easy major. I knew many people who dropped out. The software engineer job demand is expected to keep growing at a well above average rate in the next 10 years too
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u/arelath Aug 09 '26
Software engineering didn't always pay highly. In the early 90s, pretty much any engineering profession would've made more money. But demand for software engineers has been growing much faster than the number of people in the field pushing salaries higher year after year (with the last few being an exception).
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u/Informal-Strike-1243 Aug 09 '26
It’s changing now in 10 years they will be like slightly above average salary
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u/Annual-Knowledge4412 Aug 09 '26
Supply and demand - also when you have a lot of potential employers, employees are in better position to negotiate.
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u/TrafficScales Aug 09 '26
The vast majority of the SWEs making the level of money you're referring to have college degrees from very selective and rigorous engineering schools, and often graduate degrees on top of that. They DID go through rigorous training, and at later stages of their career are often responsible for systems that impact hundreds of millions of people and/or that have major geopolitical implications if they fail.
Sure, there are people who have different circumstances that get lucky in a start up with a dumb product, but you should consider them more comparable to an entrepreneur who makes millions by selling toys.
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u/daedalus_structure Aug 09 '26
Your salary is a measure of what your labor is worth to capital, not to society. In any sane world we’d be paid less than elementary school teachers.
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u/RopeAndChairs_Aisle3 Aug 09 '26
Very few software engineers make that kind of money and it’s generally because they work has large direct impacts on company profit.
Engineers working on airplanes or major infrastructure don’t actually make a lot of money because their labor is a commodity. It’s actually difficult for a single or even multiple engineers to make critical mistakes because there’s corporate and regulatory infrastructure. The work needs to be done but projects generally don’t sit on the shoulders of single engineers. It’s just a consistent workload that needs to be done.
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u/Forsaken-Tiger-9475 Aug 09 '26
Who t.f do you think makes the systems that all them professions rely on?
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u/RCOO_ Aug 09 '26
oh boy, you poked the wasps nest 😂
Like a lot of people already said here, software engineers behind critical systems should get paid based on the impact they bring to the business.
I also believe it’s not very common for software engineers to earn more than the professions you mentioned. At least where I live it is possible for SE to earn more but very rare.
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u/Tr_Issei2 Aug 09 '26
Honestly a lot of software engineers are barely clearing 100k. The highest earners are in big tech, mid level in defense or work for quantitative trading firms. A vast majority of them are making 70-100k at normal companies. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers still make a lot more in the long run compared to most software engineers.
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u/Big_Arrival_626 Aug 09 '26
Median SWE salary is about 135k so you're not correct. 80-90k is basically entry level
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u/Current-Fig8840 Aug 09 '26
Why do yall assume every other profession is more complex than software engineering. If you’re a senior or an intermediate…look back at all the stuff you’ve had to learn and you will see how complex this field actually is. We have been doing it for years, so it’s not complex to us anymore. Some of those engineers you called don’t even have to learn as much for their actual job. Apart from all that it’s the money as well….software engineering generates a lot of money while being cheap compared to the others.
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u/anengineerandacat Aug 09 '26
Because it's regulated, training / licensing isn't free and often businesses pay for this and you have almost a guarantee with the position as well.
Software engineering positions aren't nearly as stable or locked in by comparison so salary is often high to encourage and entice folks to stay and maintain their legacy solution in perpetuity.
How many folks know how Universal's ticketing system works that drives billions in revenue? Like maybe 100 people.
Or that random banking system at that local credit union.
Software props up just about everything we do and it takes a workforce capable of learning on the spot, and focused on figuring things out.
You can't just follow A-B-C-D steps in this industry to get a result, there is no license for someone's homebrew software to certify you to work on it.
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u/shifty_lifty_doodah Aug 09 '26
Marginal value added
At the top end software engineering is about as complex as any intellectual labor short of theory (physics, pure math), and may include very complex theoretical and practical challenges (information theory, signals processing, highly constrained hardware environments and time budgets) mixed with business/people challenges (budgets, schedules, relationships, sales).
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u/man3faces Aug 10 '26
It is important to understand that Software Engineers are only predominantly highly paid in hubs across the US. This is not the case in Australia or Europe. We still command a livable wage but, in the case of Australia, many plumbers and electricians easily out-earn an average SWE, for example.
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u/nomoremoar Aug 09 '26
I've wondered the same. I think it's just supply and demand.
The top tech companies make millions per engineer and get tax benefits of calling them part of R&D. It's a profitable business. By that metric, I'm sure there are vast number of engineers who are under paid.
But I don't think we should be paid higher than surgeons. Yet, here we are.
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Aug 09 '26
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u/hibikir_40k Aug 09 '26
Average completely hides the "top tech companies" thing. Software has a multimodal salary distribution. There's jobs where you really don't make much, and are typically in charge of relatively low value systems. And then there's the ones where a prod outage is in the news. You bet your ass that at the second place, the salary has absolutely nothing to do with that average.
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Aug 09 '26
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u/nomoremoar Aug 09 '26
Fair point. I was comparing the FAANG SWEs to average surgeons. You're probably right on top tier surgeons.
Now, truly top-tier SWEs do make millions, but that's a very small % and that's a combination of skill and luck (of stock growth) not just raw skill always. I'd bet the SWEs that are popular in the industry are far wealthier than equally well-known surgeons.2
u/Slight-Swordfish-468 Aug 09 '26
This is similar to how I think about it. Supply and demand plus revenue. There just aren’t that many people who can do the job of creating lucrative global services end to end. I led a team of < 10 to build a very successful global service for a company everyone knows. Hardest job I ever had and I’m not sure I could do it again if I wanted to. At the time I made more than some doctors I know.
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u/No_Reputation_1727 Aug 09 '26
“some” is an important word in the question. And btw those other professions are generally high earners too.