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by _dps 1881 days ago
In the right position, excellent SWEs have enormous leverage. A median SWE might maintain some line-of-business app for an insurance company, and an excellent one might create software that is used by an entire industry (say, Redis just as an example).

By comparison, given the physical and time constraints of the job, an excellent nurse might be able to spread their expertise to 2x as many patients as a median? 3x? I think even 3x is a stretch. Maybe they can make a life-saving catch in the hardest 5% of cases (definitionally, very rare opportunity to apply this level of skill)?