That's because the process to have any chance in the competition to become a doctor is arduous and there's no consolation prize.

If you aspire to work at FAANG and fail you can be a software developer somewhere else. If you aspire to be a doctor and aren't admitted to med school, those years of education, volunteering, shadowing, test prep, etc. are fairly useless.

And even if you succeed, the hours are as bad as can be and the pay isn't much better than FAANG. It's not a logical choice unless you really want it, while software dev is (was?) a great career choice even if you don't care about software.

For all these reasons, a lot of people are filtered out long before applying to med school.

You’re making my argument for me. The percentage of people who are actively trying to get into FAANG but don’t is higher than the percentage of people actively trying to become doctors.

It’s more selective. So comparing FAANG salaries to the average doctor salary isn’t useful. To find something equally selective, you’d need to pick a higher paid subset of doctors.

Here's why that's a silly comparison: the percentage of people on the general election ballot for US President who don't make it is lower than the percentage of people who are actively trying to get into FAANG but don’t make it. Does that mean US President is less selective? Obviously not, because that's the last of many filters for President and there are essentially no filters before "I'll send a resume to FAANG".

In the same way, there are many filters before filling out a med school application.

Anyway I can't see any way anyone could believe the "median software developer" writing CRUD web pages or in-house apps is comparable to the average physician.