Many jobs in our society enable others to do efficient work. From the bus drivers that get Google employees to work to the teachers that work 60 hour days educating future doctors and lawyers--it's hard to say that engineers are particularly special in this regard.
Sorry for coming across as implying we're special! I have to learn to watch my hyperbole. While I do value teaching highly on the meaningfulness scale[1], I don't think driving compares just as well with the mathematical argument that the effort expanded/effort saved is constant given the number of passengers you take (which in turn is practically bounded to small-ish n), whereas for software engineering that measure scales entirely differently.
[1]: If anything, I think teaching is more meaningful, using the same argument: do software engineering and you can do one human's job of software engineering. Teach 10 software engineers and you are by extension doing software engineering as 10 humans.
On a side note: if anyone here hasn't tried tutoring/teaching natural sciences/programming in a one-on-one setting or very small group, I seriously recommend it. It's surprisingly similar to software engineering; in many ways, it's wetware engineering! You get to debug the logic in people's brains as they work through problems.
Teachers do not work 60 hours a week. Bureau of Labor Statistics time use studies find that the only age group of teachers that work more than forty hours a week are those over 50.
It looks like those statistics have summer months included. That changes things from "60 hour work weeks when school is in session" to "60 hour work weeks amortized over a year".
In addition that study notes that teachers are more likely to work a second job, something a Google engineer wouldn't need to do to make a decent wage.
