Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about as intellectually demanding a job as we do.
I'm sorry, but this take is just ridiculous. I say this as somebody who has worked in various fields (education, medicine), gotten my private pilot's license, worked in education as a foreign language teacher, and done EMT and paramedic work.
Your examples are just absurd.
Software development and software engineering is such a vast and broad field that your comparison doesn't really apply. It's more of an indictment of your particular position than anything.
If all you were doing was tweaking Tailwind styles, and installing and managing WordPress, then I suppose your assessment is somewhat applicable.
But for those of us who have worked as proper software engineers (I don't particularly care if this sounds pretentious), I've never encountered more intellectually challenging problems than developing brand-new solutions and algorithms to solve complex issues.
If you had said "doctor" or even "nurse practitioner," then maybe. But the idea that working as a nurse (for 99% of nursing work) is as intellectually challenging as software engineering is just patently absurd. I don't even know what marine upholsterer is so I can't comment on that one.
The same goes for welding, even if we went so far as as to say UNDERWATER welding. This is a position that nobody in their right mind would claim is intellectually challenging. That being said it is highly paid for two reasons: it's a very high-skill job requiring substantial training (in much the same way as getting your ATP), and it comes with a set of significant risks.
Let me give you ONE example. Just one.
I remember my first job out of university as a C++/C# developer. We had a large technically minded QA team. A lot of our feature work was in SDK plugins developed as DLLs which we would license to external companies.
We were running into an issue where it was difficult for the QA team to quickly iterate/field test our work without us having to write custom test harnesses for them.
I remember reading through the SDK reference manual for C# and reading about this concept of Reflection which would allow one to dynamically discover information about classes, methods, properties, fields, events even to the point of examining the actual arguments that could be passed in and their allowable data types.
All of a sudden I realized that I could write an entire dynamic testing harness (which I dubbed "Pandora's Box") that could dynamically generate UI to run tests by pointing it at any of our managed DLLs with support for feeding in CSV to manage regression tests as well.
I did this - I came to the realization, I figured out how to implement it, everything was me. I soon left the company after a couple years, and learned later that it became an important internal tool used for many subsequent years beyond my tenure.
That is one just ONE example of a thousand things that I've personally come up with and developed in my stint as a software engineer. And that was 6 months out of university as a mere associate software engineer.
I also came up with a novel way of doing OCR 15 years ago by combining genetic algorithm spinning up tesseracts with markov probability modeling against a common English corpus which exponentially improved our company's SOTA text recognition. And ON and ON and ON.
Yeah now that you put it that way it may have something to do with our individual particulars but I just don't find it as difficult as you seem to sorry.
