While what you say is sort of true, developers are paid better than what you made it sound like for me. The difference is perhaps that professions like truck drivers and a lot of tradeskills are compensated very well because there is a general lack of people in those professions. We also have very strong unions (and legislation because of it) in those areas, so it’s not easy to “displace” (is this the right English word?) truck drivers with cheap foreign labour in a lot of EU countries.

Unlike professions like plumbers, however, IT personal is becoming increasingly easy to come by. And since they never really formed unions, the so called golden days are over for a lot of IT professionals. Maybe excluding hardcore IT operations, networking and at least for now developers.

I wouldn’t be able to earn what I do as a truck driver though. Maybe half with more hours? Interestingly enough I didn’t get there by being rewarded for any work. I got there by switching jobs.