Sorry but you’re completely wrong about both your 5 years comment and your income range. For a more realistic look at physician income see https://www.offerdx.com/

Family medicine $270k. Doesn’t seem that far off.

There are two big differences. Family doctor can work easily until 65. And they don't need to live in the most expensive cities in the world.

For comparaison, there are extremely few SWEs in FAANG over 50 years old.

Extremely few? If the company only existed for less than 20 years and founded by a bunch of college dropouts, you wouldn't have many workers over 50.

You're mistaking the exponential growth of the SWE "profession" with Ageism.

The company exists for less than 20 years and since then, they have hired 10000s of SWE. Their selection process is heavily biased toward younger people, and so is their performance evaluation process. Their demographic is totally not representative or the workforce, and it's not just a coincidence.

Those are income numbers for specialists (cf. GP's comment "Unless they specialize")

The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple years.

During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through med school, residency and specialist training (after which they would have the income numbers you cited), the FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.

Again, you are just mistaken - I'm not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism, or what. General practitioners are in the above dataset, and make an amount comparable to an L5 Google SWE.

If you want to make an argument that the overall career arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a physician, then that's a very different statement than GP made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary standpoint, medicine in the US is more lucrative than big tech over the course of a ~40 year career, when you take into account lifestyle and personal flexibility, tech comes out looking better).

> over the course of a ~40 year career

To me this is an important difference between these two careers. Ageism is a thing in tech and in corporations in general. Of course, a few winners can climb the ladder and have a lucrative corporate career or earn enough money to retire early. But lots of SWEs get pushed out in their 50s or don't manage to work in fast pace / high pay environments for decades.

> General practitioners are in the above dataset

I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.

> If you want to make an argument that

I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.

> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism

Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.