If salaried software dev work is not worth it, what other salaried career is?
Just an example: sales roles generally have commission-based compensation that scales with the amount of effort you put in and actually rewards high-performers.
In comparison, the "reward" for effort in a salaried SWE job is more work and to get your token 5% raise early if you're really lucky. And that's after you go through the insane recruitment & interviewing processes.
The SWE salary income might sound high at first glance when you're young and fresh but tops out quickly (and of course that top end has been significantly eroded by inflation), much lower than other roles.
This of course all relative geographically but we're certainly very well compensated compared to other industries.
There could be a big spread from smaller tech companies, and governments/police/military/etc that pay low even for tech positions.
So actually I would be really curious to meet/talk to someone that took a tech job in say police/military or such.
Most devs are probably in the top 20-30% band making tech a relatively "normal" (but good) salary in the local region.
I could be entirely wrong though :)