I'd call Florence Nightingale a 100x nurse, or maybe a 10,000x nurse, for the impact she had on the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#Statistic...

We do have certain other advantages though. We can create a start-up and potentially make a huge amount of money. This is a realistic possibility for a substantial percentage of good developers. Much fewer people from other industries have that kind of chance.

I’m in no way mentally prepared to be a nurse. That is something I suspect I would never ever be able to do. That has to do with skills (especially hard to learn skills, like interacting with people properly), it also has to do with being emotionally ready to do such a job. Especially a job like being a nurse is in my estimation not something you can just teach. You need people who are prepared, ready and willing to do the job.

I think very, very few of those 1,000 programmers would be ready to work in hospitals. I would not at all be surprised if you could find more great programmers among 1,000 nurses than you can find great nurses among 1,000 programmers. To me being a nurse is an extremely demanding job.

None of them, because programmers hate working with people so they'd all quit.

How do you know? Do you have some kind of special formula to determine what people deserve to be paid? Otherwise, it's just subjective.

Do gravediggers get paid relatively more than other kinds of jobs in countries where there is essentially no immigration for economic reasons? I doubt it.