[onion2k]

high-end software engineering

Your original post was about the average salary engineers get, which implies you're referring to average engineers. Shifting the post to be about high-end software engineering means you should also shift to talking about high-end lawyers. You can't reasonably talk about high-end engineers who get average engineer wages compared to median lawyers. That doesn't make sense.

Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.

That's absolutely not true. Programming includes all manner of things from complex tasks like hacking on the Linux kernel or writing shaders for games, right down to making a VBScript macro in Word or writing a formula in Excel. Once you realise that you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program" in the sense of turning an algorithm in to something a computer can understand. Programming is relatively easy. What's hard is programming well, designing programs that interact with each other, and working out what needs to be programmed in the first place.

[jstanley]

> > maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.

> you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program"

"hundreds of millions" seems comparable to 10% of the population.