- Many doctors earn 100k or 3-400k depending on their field.
- Many small business owners earn <100k or make a killing, depending on their field, goals, and success/luck.
- 9 out of 10 startups outright fail or aren't successful enough to compensate founders & employees for the opportunity cost.
The log-normal also applies somewhat for lawyers. The partners of big firms make millions annually.
As long as we're getting into nuance, I should add that the two-peak distribution is most clear for lawyer starting salary, not long-time professional. You either go top firm or not.
There are strong network effects in many digital markets. In these cases, given enough time, it leads to a monopolist employer in that market. Even in cases where there are a few firms competing (e.g. Google and Apple), they have incentive to form a cartel through 'agreements' on hiring practices (and there have been documented instances of this). The natural way for software developers to avoid being exploited, in either scenario, is to form a labour monopsony...
Well, the real nuance is that the AMA is not so much a union as a guild. It's not _legal_ to perform medical services without an AMA-blessed licence to practice.
If one could concoct a scheme by which it would be illegal to perform "unlicenced" software engineering work, I suppose there would be the same effect.
You'd need a common sense of injustice. It's a lot easier to do this for, say, graduate students who really are underpaid.
--When I got my first job as a software engineer, my dad, who's a civil engineer PE said, "I thought you were going to be an engineer, but it sounds like you're just a computer programmer." :-)
Coders? Never.
Interview for medical job: Normal
Coders?: Often humiliating
And no we aren't all coding in Cobol or Fortran 4.
I do agree though that it would be difficult for most of us to get new jobs in another company as developers because of the age-ist behaviour of many of our younger colleagues.
I guess your 22 year old founder of a trendy Bay Area startup would have a problem hiring a 60 year old but that's both silly and illegal. I'm not sure trendy Bay Area startups attract the 60+ crowd anyway.
Anecdotally, three very different examples:
my mother (71) stopped coding in 1969
Guido van Rossum (60) is still coding
Darryl Havens (61) is Distinguished Engineer at Amazon - not per se a coding role, but definitely an engineering role
The stressful period for most doctors is getting into medical school, getting through medical school, and getting into and through internships and residencies. That is roughly 10 years or so, and during that time it is absolutely at the pace and pressure I see in software development..but once they finish, for most of them, it is pretty smooth sailing. Those at the top of the game are a different story, but that's true anywhere.
The real difference is that doctors have a powerful lobby that artificially limits their numbers, essentially providing a benefit similar to unionization. You can't massively up the numbers of doctors being trained in the U.S., and you can't import massive numbers of foreign workers to increase supply. No matter how many capable people there are, the numbers will remain artificially constrained.
Software development doesn't have this protection. The only lobby in software development is regularly pushing for massive increases in supply through various channels. Doctors' salaries have continued to rise year after year..not so sure software development salaries will fare as well in the coming years..especially after we convince software devs they are already overpaid ;)