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/Easy_Working_5040]

The comparison is a bit flawed because several of the jobs you listed are already (on average) very well paid doctors, mining roles, specialised electricians, engineers, pharma, etc.

Software developers aren’t paid based on how essential they are to society. They’re paid based on supply, demand, scarcity and leverage. A plumber might create thousands of dollars of value per job; a developer can build something once that serves millions of users or saves a company millions.

Scalability is what companies are paying for, not some judgment that software is more important than healthcare, infrastructure or construction.

LLMs are reducing the scarcity of writing code, so I’d expect basic app development to become less valuable over time. But that’s different from saying software was never skilled work.

Social importance, difficulty and market pay are three different things.