Is that really true? This article [1] lists a top 10% petrochemical engineer's salary as $146,000. A fairly skilled senior software engineer at, say, Google can easily pull in $250-300K in total comp, and a programmer on Wall Street or independent consultant with good domain knowledge in wealthy industries like banking can pull in $300-500K/year. That's not even counting talent acquisitions, which can go for $1M/engineer/year.

[1] http://work.chron.com/salary-petrochemical-engineer-4334.htm...