Well, depends on the country you live in.

My country: https://www.platy.cz/platy/doprava-spedice-logistika/pilot https://www.platy.cz/platy/informacni-technologie/programato...

Average is CZK per calendar month gross (which is some 25-30% higher than net).

Pilots 38k - 132k Programmers 36k - 86k

as employees. If you work as a freelancer programmer (i.e. you have your own trade license) you can easily earn twice as much but if you count-in all the employee benefits granted by the Work law it's usually not worth it if you already have a family (which I have, therefore I switched from freelancing to being an employee).

And of course, Ryanair/EasyJet pilots are not counted in the statistics. The same goes to students - programmers which kludge together a Wordpress site and "sell" it.

Those numbers roughly match what pilots make in USA[0], but 86,000 CZK per month is about 20% (or less) of what an entry-level programmer would make in the USA. The lower bound of 36,000 CZK per month would be only just above USA federal minimum wage.

I think part of the push-back against programmer unions from American programmers is that there's such a wide range of skills, and at the moment the market allocates compensation more-or-less according to capability. In many important ways, a programmer earning $500,000 per year at Google is in a different industry than a programmer earning $50,000 per year at General Motors.

[0] $52,000 per year according to https://www.indeed.com/career/pilot/salaries

Gosh... can't imagine paying for my pilot training (even in the USA it's usually half of what's here) and be paid $52k.

It's pretty disingenuous to equate a RyanAir pilot with a student, which speaks to the misleading nature of comparing these statistics straight up; go look at what it takes in terms of training, experience and seniority to get to one of those higher paid pilot jobs. Now compare it to software development. 36k is less than minimum wage in Canada ( < $2K CAD / month); junior developers are easily making 3x that in their first role.

> It's pretty disingenuous to equate a RyanAir pilot with a student

Ironically, as Ryanair pays pilots significantly more than the range in the GP's comments (at below the low-end and high-end), including them would support their argument.

The only way to make the claim that pilots earn more than developers stick is to ignore all but the high-end of pilot salaries at major airlines and include all developers. A fairer comparison would either be to include all pilots (including the low end piston engine pilots at skydiving DZs and other utility roles) or to only include the top-earning professional developers (maybe MAGMA).