I’m not sure that the lesson to be learned from the medical profession’s overburdening of its professionals is that other well paid industries should follow suit and overburden their own professionals.
Is the medical profession unique in that way? Do lawyers not need to keep up with existing legislation and case law? I know research scientists that use alerting tools for getting notified about publications covering their subject.
Sure, I just used medical as the example because that’s what the parent comment talked about. There are many other industries with problems maintaining a good work/life balance for people who work there. Often those gigs are lower paid than tech work. I worked many more hours and had a more stressful, less predictable life when I worked at a nonprofit, before I became a developer. Now I mostly work 9-5, sometimes an extra hour or two here and there but no expectation that I’m doing stuff outside of work. I have some side projects, meetups etc that I spend time on, but can also spend time at work learning new things or trying stuff out.
Then salaries in our industry need to decrease if we don't want to be held to a standard of overburdening ourselves.
The salaries in our industry have a precedent which was set by individuals that overburdened themselves. That might have been irrational, but if we want to change that, then we need to accept less pay. We can't have the same rewards as they did while doing less work, even if the amount of work they did was unreasonable.
We aren’t being rewarded for how hard we work, we’re being rewarding for having skills that are in high demand while supply has not caught up yet. Salaries may well go down in future when the need for developers is less or the pool of talent is bigger. We also aren’t trapped by the examples set by previous developers - our productivity varies depending on what we are doing, the tools we are using, what our team is like, etc - not just the raw number of hours we put in.
Nonsense and worse words. It's a market. Undervaluing ourselves only hurts ourselves.
The net revenue per software developer at any even moderately successful tech company is so eye-poppingly high that demanding a solid cut of it is still a bargain.