That's the point: relative pay matters, and an important + scarce job _deserves_ higher pay than others.
>If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency...
These aren't arbitrary boundaries - this is difficult work with significant downside risk if you fuck up. Not anyone can be a doctor, and we need doctors, so those who succeed deserve higher pay. Virtually anyone can be a Fry Cook or a Walmart Greeter.
Uncomfortable fact: society needs doctors and engineers (software or otherwise) many times more than we need fast food workers.
I also think the medical field suffers because the only people who become doctors were people who have been on the track for becoming a doctor their whole life. An engineering firm might have artists and philosophers and tradesmen who are passionate about engineering and self-taught, bringing very unique perspectives to various problems. These same people have enough talent, motivation and humility that they probably would make great doctors too.
And I know for a fact that doctors would benefit from e.g. a systems engineering or fluid dynamics background to better understand the medicines they're prescribing and be more equipped to prescribe the right one in the right doses, or maybe a math/statistics background to understand unintuitive numerical data such as "X diagnostic test is 99% accurate.... [fine print] because it reports 100% of cases as negative and only 1% of cases are ever positive".
My imagination can only go so far with examples, and I know there are very good reasons for the tight restrictions, but I strongly believe the restrictions are too tight.
If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize.
Conversely, if software development required an arduous, expensive, hyper-restrictive license, there would be no need for software developers to unionize either