Working in tech is not exactly easy, even if you love computers. You have to move to some awfully expensive part of the country and interact with some extremely thin skinned people all day, and spend hours upon hours examining minute details of systems supporting systems supporting systems that you never even knew existed.
Plus it's very competitive. You can't just sit around and rest on one's laurels. You have to constantly be learning and god help you when you need to interview and land a new job.
It depends. I've met a few engineers who coast by on their experience and seniority, likely putting in less than 10 hours per week of actual work. They don't make top dollar, but are still paid handsomely by most measures. Of course, they had to prove themselves first to earn the privilege.
I don't want to generalize (anecdata and all that), but it seems like this would be pretty easy to do at many big (non-FAANG) companies.
> You have to move to some awfully expensive part of the country and interact with some extremely thin skinned people all day, and spend hours upon hours examining minute details of systems supporting systems supporting systems that you never even knew existed.
Sounds a lot like engineering to be honest. Lots of travelling to facilities in the middle of nowhere, people that never click together, examining systems with no documentation that you never knew existed in the first place, etc.
Which means that this is not a good explanation for the salary disparity between engineering and tech, as both fields deal with similar problems, yet one is paid substantially more.
Isn't it obvious? Software scales globally with effectively zero margin, so if you combine this with network effects and blue ocean, unregulated markets in user data, that meant a massive high new ceiling for software engineers set by Google and Facebook.
