> one of the best paying industries in this time and age
Medicine is still better paid and better paid universally. Silicon valley is really the outlier here, most of Europe and the world programmers don't get paid that much in comparison.
Software development is usually better paid in Poland than medicine. Medicine starts to pay good way later in life, and only in certain specialisations.
In the US. In many other places, medicine is an undergraduate field of study, you're in a hospital from your first year, and by year 3 you're being paid.
In The Netherlands this seems to be true. However, as a programmer you can work from home in many cases, especially now. So suppose that a junior psychiatrist makes 5000 EUR gross in NL [1] and a junior developer 2600 EUR gross [2].
A few things though:
1. A psychiatrist has to commute 1 to 2 hours per day. So that salary is not for 8 hours per day, but 9 hours at minimum. Adjusting their salary to an 8 hour basis, it needs to be multiplied by 8/9 or higher like 8/10.
2. The psychiatrist has to be on location. The cost associated with that is hard to quantify, but it is there. For example, I always sleep during the afternoon for 20 minutes, a psychiatrist can't do that. Also, I can take a break whenever I want, a psychiatrist can be on call for 24 hours straight in severe cases. Let's suppose this gives a cost of 1/16 as a multiplier (half an hour of extra work per day).
So the minimum overhead a psychiatrist has is 16/19, their salary is then 4200 EUR. This can be amazing or not so much, considering your own personal preference. My personal multiplier is 0.8 on top of all of this, so for me a 5000 EUR salary is worth 3360 EUR if it's working as a psychiatrist.
As a developer I experience something different, which is:
1. I do not have to commute, I can if I want to, but don't have to.
2. I do not have to be on location, nor do I have a strict schedule for going client after client. I can take random breaks during the day if it helps me be more productive.
So a developer's salary for 2600 EUR is much more like an actual 2600 EUR in that sense. Moreover, my personal multiplier for being a developer is a 1. There are some things I dislike and some things I absolutely love about being a dev (e.g. being a true netizen in the sense that you can randomly act with APIs if you want to).
To conclude: the absolute values are far apart, but the relative values might not. It differs on a person by person basis, and I haven't discussed the whole picture of course (e.g. needing to stay sharp as a dev, I don't know how that works for psychiatrists).
At what age are you a junior developer and at what age are you a junior psychiatrist in NL? A bachelor's developer could be as young as 21 I guess, but at least for most jobs in medicine you can't work independently until much later. Maybe it's different for psychiatry?
It's not different for psychiatry. You need to have done a bachelor + master in medicine and on top of that a specialization. I don't know how long that takes though, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 8+ years.
FAANG engineers are also massively over paid, compared to your average software engineer in any random country.
When people on HN discuses salaries, or I see a job posting from a Silicon Valley company I can't help think that we don't even pay our CTO that much. Frequently you could get two developers for the same price here in Denmark.
Those companies have one heck of a combined market position and it is all built with software. I would say their software engineers are paid more but I doubt that "overpaid" applies.
Think about what your CTO could do in that setting and realize that he's probably worth more to FAANG shareholders than to you hence the salary differential.
> Medicine has been more poorly paid than FAANG software engineering in the last two places I've lived (South Africa, Australia)
Interesting. I'm in South Africa, right now. The largest offer for a senior C# dev *right now* on www.pnet.co.za is R960k/a.
Twelve years ago, the GP that I was dating, who worked in a *state hospital* (i.e. not making as much as she could have in private practice) was making more than that.
I don't believe that doctors' salaries over the last 12 years have effectively been lowered. OTOH, if you know of places where they are offering more than R1.8m/a for senior developers, then by all means give me their contact details.
Happy to refer you to AWS! I was making over 1m rand (TC) as a mid level non dev position. I had friends in development making above the number you're talking.
Medicine is still better paid and better paid universally. Silicon valley is really the outlier here, most of Europe and the world programmers don't get paid that much in comparison.