Low pay, horrific hours, limited opportunities to advance, doing the same thing a million times, dead-man’s shoes, having to work against a schedule, living out of corporate hotels, unionisation, union-imposed seniority rules, shrinking market, pending automation... what is there to like about it?

Top pilots with the best seniority who can play the union game talk about achieving the same pay an undergraduate intern gets in a tech company.

While there's doubtless something to what you say, I don't believe there are that many undergrad interns getting the pay of a senior pilot. You're thinking of an extremely select subset of tech companies.

Yes my comparison was with extremes... but I wouldn't bet against the average working pilot earning less than the average tech intern either.

Tech salaries aren't a reasonable baseline. It's an outlier.

Spend ~4/7 of your life in mediocre hotels far from home, work itself consists of sitting in a cramped box with even less to do than than the passengers on the flight, money can be good but not career-goals good... I can see it.

One reason it's not great is there are a lot of pilot wannabees that are stuck flying small commercial feeder flights, and they don't have much experience and training, and they get paid barely enough to live on. They hope to get on to one of the bigger companies (american, united, etc). The flights a few years ago that iced up in NY state (I think that was where) were sleeping on someone's couch for a few hours only before a flight, and they didn't have much training.

From what I've read on r/aviation, that was true 10-15 years ago, but not last year. The airline industry goes through cycles of "too many damn pilots" to "oh my god we need more pilots". I was reading some smaller airlines were will to train you to get your type rating and starting pay of $60-70k.