We don't pay people (much more) based on the physical difficulty of their job. If we did, I'm sure the migrant labor that picks our fruit would be first in line for a raise.

My RN friend graduated and got her RN a full 3 years before I graduated with my CS degree. Nursing might be a more demanding job, but it has a much lower barrier to entry than CS, and thus it has a much larger supply (despite nursing orgs complaining about shortages), and a fairly fixed demand that's only increasing as the population ages.

Most programming jobs neither require nor actually need a CS degree. I don't have one and I'm doing pretty ok. Gluing frameworks together is not exactly difficult and has nothing to do with lambda calculus or compiler internals

> My RN friend graduated and got her RN a full 3 years before I graduated with my CS degree.

What took you so long?

I took 5y because I had a misguided detour into aerospace engineering for a couple years. She was out in 2y