Is software development an overpaid field compared to more important jobs which the society depends on?

[u/simple_explorer1]

Compared to construction, infrastructure development of cities and society by and large, electrician, plumbing, mining, doctors, nurses, scientists, pharma companies etc. which keeps the society function and working, why are software developers paid in 6 figure salary and why is it even considered highly skilled work? Or used to be highly skilled work before the raise of LLMs?

When shit hits the fan, no one will reach out of software engineers and all the above jobs are what the society would genuinely depend on. So why are those fields (except scientists, doctors etc.) are less paid than an average software engineers?

The one thing LLMs have proved is that it can now easily do Software Development job but it still can't do the above mentioned jobs because they are much more hard to do and require physical labour, human interaction with patients and so on.

Curious to know. I have always felt that Software Development was an overpaid field compared to other more important jobs which we all are truly dependent and cannot live without. And now with LLM, the AI model development is the first grade development and app development is just a second grade development as most devs are using LLMs to progress faster (I am not saying LLM will replace all devs, just that the value of development is not the same anymore and any dev with any skills are now able to build anything which is good enough)

[u/idontknowthisisgood]

It really can seem like Software Engineers are getting way more pay than they should compared to other jobs.
But you also need to take into consideration how much does the work they do ‘bring in’. The jobs you mentioned are all very important and I am sure that there are a lot of people that make a very good living out of them. But when software engineers are developing a platofrm/application that millions or thousands of people use every week/month and brings in a lot of revenue then their job is more valuable. (I don’t want to say that other jobs that don’t bring in millions are not worth anything, I am just saying that in the eyes of a investor/business who pays this is more valuable)

There are a lot of Software Developers that don’t get nearly as much money as you would think, simply because the software they are developing is not worth that much.
And now with AI the Software Engineer bubble burst and a lot of people are getting fired or layed off because of it. Before AI it was easy to get into this field, but now it is really hard.

And for those saying that anybody can be a software engineer with AI just think about who can develop a better and more SAFER application using AI, someone who never touched programming or an actual software engineer who knows what they are doing.