[sokoloff]

“What’s the difference between a regional pilot and a large pepperoni pizza?” “The pizza can feed a family of four.”

It’s a very long road to get to a decent paying flying job and if your reference is “well-paying like software was”, it basically never happens.

[ryandrake]

Yea, piloting is fun, but a long, loooong grind. It takes a while just to start making peanuts flying regional jets. By the time you are in the big bucks range, you could have done a bachelor’s in biology, med school, your residency and become a doctor.

And starting in air traffic control has an age limit of 30 years old[1], so it might be too late for you already. Talk about even worse ageism than software!

1: https://work.chron.com/many-years-college-need-air-traffic-c...

[travisjungroth]

Having been a pilot (though not for an airline) and now being a software engineer I feel somewhat qualified to speak to this. Doesn’t really matter since airline pay is public and I think levels.fyi does a good job.

Captain at a major airline is attainable, it just takes time. Looks like that’s capping out at $270k right now (I’m sure I’m missing some benefits or something). Pilot pay isn’t nearly as affected by geography and multiple days of work mean an otherwise insane commute (like multiple states) is possible. An airline captain in a small town in Iowa is doing better than a software engineer. But the software engineer in Silicon Valley is doing way better. This was all prepandemic and I imagine that’s shaken up remote work pay a lot. So who knows.

But if you want to get out software because it’s a grind, stay far far away from the airlines. Sure you don’t have a scrum master breathing down your neck. You have complete autonomy to do the exact same thing over and over the exact same way until you retire. Imagine building the same app for the tenth time but no, literally, it’s the exact same app and it’s not the tenth it’s the thousandth.