> If I ever imagine myself to be fairly compensated because not everyone can do coding (which is true)... then I look at how teachers, adjunct professors, electricians, plumbers, truckers, etc. are paid and I realize yeah, no... I just sit on my ass all day, code a few hours a day and sit in on meetings and such and the money comes in. It's not even in the same league as other professions in terms of how hard you have to work vs how much you get paid. Especially when I look at my actual friends in tech proper, who work like 10-15 hours a week by their own admittance a week and make way more money. All around it just screams "bubble".
Honestly you're looking in the wrong direction. Yeah, there are lots of undercompensated lines of work. But lots of white collar work involves even less actual work or competence than software engineering. Offices are full of people who are terrible at their jobs but basically just fail upwards. Local governments and public school systems have tons of administrative positions that get paid big six figure salaries to basically do no real work.
Honestly you're looking in the wrong direction. Yeah, there are lots of undercompensated lines of work. But lots of white collar work involves even less actual work or competence than software engineering. Offices are full of people who are terrible at their jobs but basically just fail upwards. Local governments and public school systems have tons of administrative positions that get paid big six figure salaries to basically do no real work.