But overtime I think doctors will earn more than software engineers. Also doctors are more valued the more senior they are, while software engineers not as much, need to move to management, ageism, etc.
Compared to what's on levels.fyi, most specialties will earn less than software engineers. Only cardiologists, gastroenterologists, radiologists, anesthesiologists, and the surgical specialties will have a chance at out earning someone at FAANG.
To be fair, levels.fyi is a very poor indicator of salary levels across the industry, whereas salary reporting on physicians isn't.
Median salary for physicians is almost certainly significantly higher than for software engineers, but it is less obvious what happens when you factor in length of career, debt load etc.
Neither group tend to work nominal (40h) weeks either...
> most specialties will earn less than software engineers
Nah. The average salary of a software engineer is about $104k per year (remember, <10% of IT people work at FAANGs).
The average earnings of doctors according to Medscape is around $290k, and even primary care doctors earn $237k per year on average. [1]
> Only [1/10th of docs] will have a chance at out earning someone at FAANG.
And FAANG is a similarly small highly-paid fraction of the software workforce as well, so it is comparing like-for-like again. And average pay for those medical specialties according to [1] is $350k to $500k per year, which I bet beats the average pay of even FAANG individual contributors pretty handsomely...
On average, doctors earn far more than software engineers. Only a small portion of software engineers can compete with doctors and it's clustered in a few select regions of the US.
