I joke, but most lawyers actually don't make a ton of money. Like programming, the profession is very bimodal. By the time you get out of law school, unless that law school is a big name like Harvard or you get a good clerkship or associate job, you will be heading for a career that tops out at $200k/year if you don't burn out in the mean time.

Plumbing, electrical work, and other trade work is weirdly lucrative and doesn't come with nearly as much "ladder climbing" as a legal career. Also, a mid-career trade worker can specialize (taking only very lucrative and weird jobs) or start to manage other tradespeople. Plumbing and the other trades are a lot like software engineering in that sense, and the reward for being the plumber who knows how to deal with water pumps in high-rises is similar to the reward for being the software engineer who can program GPUs (or some other niche skill). For example, I happen to have met one of the people who does the HVAC in Google NYC, and he makes the same amount as a senior SWE at Google.