1984 – When women stopped coding

Compensation figures really have to be adjusted for hours worked, stress levels, work environment, schooling required (and associated opportunity cost of lost income), etc.

On top of that I'd also like to see innate cognitive ability factored in.

My guess is that once all the relevant variables are accounted for there's not much difference between the different professions.

It will boil down to what one likes to do. Because that's going to be what you stick with and develop excellence in over time. Medicine, law, and programming are all pretty radically different field, so whether or not you enjoy the work is really going to matter. Pick one you like and you'll do fine.

Note: The top end in annual comp for doctors and lawyers may be $1M but you really can't compare that to the top end in annual comp for CS because many developers at the top end are compensated in equity - which isn't paid out as income on an annual basis.

Yeah, that's because these days starting a new company has become hip.

A job in a large company brings visions of a hall full of clerks these days. So more and more men think of starting companies as the new way to get the kick out of this profession.

Start ups is the new programming.

LOL, only if by "investment decisions" you mean "luck into a 1 out of 1000 unicorn startup". I don't know a single programmer retired in their 30s who did it with salary and retail investing.

You don't even need to go all the way up to medicine. According to US News and Report "Best Jobs"[1][2], median salaries for developers in San Francisco ($114,400), ostensibly ground zero for the "shortage", are only a whisker higher than they are for dental hygienists ($112,970) and are considerably lower than for registered nurses ($127,670).

[1] go to US News and World Report "Best Jobs" and drill down by salary and region. Alternatively, you can go to the BLS site - which is what the US News numbers are based on.

[2] I'd also like to acknowledge that these numbers "seem" low to me. It's based on BLS data by region, but dev salaries seem higher than this in SF.

I've posted this on HN a few times, and I've realized that I need to qualify this with a few statements.

I have no problem with nurses earning higher salaries than software developers. It's a difficult and vitally important job and nurses deserve their high salaries and high scores on surveys of professional respect.

Yes, programmers have more upside, but check the BLS directly for higher percentile salaries. It isn't until you get to the 90%ile for devs and nurses (in SF) that the devs earn more, and even then, it's only by a whisker. There are also lots of downsides - age related employment issues can get pretty bad for software developers. I do think that nurses have better job stability, experience few age-related employment issues in middle age, and may actually have better job flexibility (they can't wander off and get a cup of coffee whenever they feel like it like most devs can, but many nursing and medical specialties have remarkable options to scale back on work for a period of time, such as having a kid, without severely compromising the long term career path).

Another complicating factor - anyone who reads a book on PHP can call him or herself a "software developer" (though BLS stats base this on people who use the title or something similar on a tax return, I believe). Nursing, on the other hand, requires a degree and formal licensure. So it's not quite apples-to-apples. Then again, we separate out physicians from nurses, whereas we include very high salary devs in that number, so again, it's complicated and difficult to make these comparisons.

Also, these are numbers for San Francisco - nurses do not out earn developers everywhere. However, the higher concentration of devs in SF/Silicon Valley could skew the numbers as well.

I'll stop here, and simply acknowledge that interpreting this data is certainly more complex than simply listing some medians. My real problem is that most analyses of why group X isn't going into profession Y almost never consider the possibility that this may in fact be a highly rational response to market signals. This isn't the only factor, and the social issues NPR mentions are highly relevant. However, we really do need to explore the extent to which a preference for law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentisty, or even dental hygiene over software development may be highly rational.

>>who can make an above-average salary

An above average salary in most common cases is interchangeable with 'living within means'. You can start with whatever little you have and grow.

Its really not about how small you start, its about how quickly and consistently you are making an attempt to grow.