You're over thinking this. I'm talking about high school and college students picking majors. I'm talking about what parents telling their kids to do. Immigrants moving to America picking a career to support their family.
No one quits Goldman Sachs's deal floor to work at Facebook. They skip the finance class and go to data structures freshman year. The alum they met at google are rich and happy and the alum from wall street are bitter and tired and overworked.
> the type of thinking that is needed is very different
Eh, its different but its not that crazy. Most of tech is not that hard. The harder part of being at a top firm anywhere is being generally successful enough to achieve the goal. The top few % of people that go to top school and go to top wall street banks or consulting firms or get into med school can do that.
> "ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.
You can replace acme with any tech company. You can work at apple making 300k and making a crud app. Tons of Silicon Valley companies are paying 300k+ for engineers and many of those engineers aren't solving problems that are particularly hard.
Tech is poaching from academia and quantitative finance people -- not the normal professional careers because the type of thinking that is needed is very different from IB & law & medicine. It's not about hours.
I know plenty of doctors and lawyers and consultants and IB. The only people I know in other careers who I think could make it as well as the top tech workers have are people who are in physics and other STEM academia (my major) or quants who work for major market making firms (ie. Jane St, Citadel).
> ACME Co's Random CRUD App team
"ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.