That just reads as “I am better than you”.
Programming is arbitrarily difficult, and it rarely has an objective reality to measure against. I have some kind of “Peter Principle” in mind where people continuously reach their own personal limits of complexity. However they then expand their skills in an ill-defined problem space to level up and beat their prior limits. Programmers display a massive variety of talent, and most of the talent is invisible because the problem space is heinously deeply complex and outside observers only see glimmers on the surface.
Or is your implication that idiots and/or lazy people choose to be programmers? Certainly there is a share of them in the discipline too: perhaps smart for chasing money and perhaps even content with the challenges they face personally.
Regardless, you are being very judgmental towards programming.
Your own descriptions of your discipline could be perceived as rote work or make work, on the same level as making another CRUD app for a business, that doesn’t require deep applied intelligence. How people apply their skills and intellect to the problem defines how hard the problem is.
Then I think of https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... which I read as a study in applied intuition in Chemistry at a genius level (with some survivor bias to boot!).
In software, there's no such thing as marginal cost, the only tool you need is a $300 laptop, and all you need to know can be read for free online. That's an amazing world, from an economic standpoint, and it's no surprise at all that it's so much easier to make money that way.
- Deciding what ratio to mix things in for the countless liquid products that are combinations of already-discovered chemicals. Everything at the grocery store that comes in a jug or a bottle (cleaning products, hair conditioner, drain cleaner) falls in to this category.
- Doing industrial research to improve existing processes. This would include discovering new catalysts, and trying out the endless permutations of solvents and conditions in which existing reactions take place, to optimize them for whatever the biggest operating costs are.
- Figuring out how to recycle industrial chemicals and get the valuable stuff back out of sludge and effluent. This is a surprisingly big field with important consequences.
- Working on specialty materials, like plastics and synthetic rubbers, that are not completely dissimilar from existing products but require a chemist to design them for specific, demanding applications.
The fact that everything involving the physical world gets you paid way less for work that's way more difficult than programming will come back to bite us somehow, but it's hard to say when.