Two things - I don't think it's as easy as you think it is. If you're good at it, it can feel comparatively easy, because when you're good at it and you enjoy it - it's fun. It's flow. You get lost in it and don't realize that you were just working flat out for 12 hours. But there are lots of things that are flow that are not easy.

I've been coding since I was 12, I have flow days where it's just an absolute pleasure. But on a bad day where I never hit flow, it's brutal. It's so hard to force myself to focus. And often when I come back the next day, the code I wrote is absolute shit and I spent a good chunk of the next day just debugging it.

So yeah, echoing those who say not easy.

The other piece of it, is that I actually think a lot of software engineers are massively underpaid. I was at my last job for 7 years. My total compensation, including benefits, options and what have you, was probably less than $1 million (over 7 years mind you). But I can draw a direct line between work I did and the enablement of millions of dollars of ARR. The company probably got anywhere from a 5x or a 10x return from their investment in me. I was paid a little under market, but not so far under market that I'm that different from the norm. I worked on some particularly high impact features in terms of return, so that line is particularly clear for me and not all of my peers there could say the same -- but a lot of them could, and even for the ones where it was less obvious it's still true. As software engineers at a software company, our work is ultimately essentially. The companies don't exist with out us.

As a class, given that, we're still underpaid ;)