Medicine is still better paid and better paid universally. Silicon valley is really the outlier here, most of Europe and the world programmers don't get paid that much in comparison.
But it requires you to refresh your knowledge constantly so from this point of view it's similar
A few things though:
1. A psychiatrist has to commute 1 to 2 hours per day. So that salary is not for 8 hours per day, but 9 hours at minimum. Adjusting their salary to an 8 hour basis, it needs to be multiplied by 8/9 or higher like 8/10.
2. The psychiatrist has to be on location. The cost associated with that is hard to quantify, but it is there. For example, I always sleep during the afternoon for 20 minutes, a psychiatrist can't do that. Also, I can take a break whenever I want, a psychiatrist can be on call for 24 hours straight in severe cases. Let's suppose this gives a cost of 1/16 as a multiplier (half an hour of extra work per day).
So the minimum overhead a psychiatrist has is 16/19, their salary is then 4200 EUR. This can be amazing or not so much, considering your own personal preference. My personal multiplier is 0.8 on top of all of this, so for me a 5000 EUR salary is worth 3360 EUR if it's working as a psychiatrist.
As a developer I experience something different, which is:
1. I do not have to commute, I can if I want to, but don't have to.
2. I do not have to be on location, nor do I have a strict schedule for going client after client. I can take random breaks during the day if it helps me be more productive.
So a developer's salary for 2600 EUR is much more like an actual 2600 EUR in that sense. Moreover, my personal multiplier for being a developer is a 1. There are some things I dislike and some things I absolutely love about being a dev (e.g. being a true netizen in the sense that you can randomly act with APIs if you want to).
To conclude: the absolute values are far apart, but the relative values might not. It differs on a person by person basis, and I haven't discussed the whole picture of course (e.g. needing to stay sharp as a dev, I don't know how that works for psychiatrists).
[1] https://www.monsterboard.nl/vacatures/zoeken/?q=Psychiater&w...
[2] https://www.glassdoor.nl/Salarissen/junior-web-developer-sal...
When people on HN discuses salaries, or I see a job posting from a Silicon Valley company I can't help think that we don't even pay our CTO that much. Frequently you could get two developers for the same price here in Denmark.
Think about what your CTO could do in that setting and realize that he's probably worth more to FAANG shareholders than to you hence the salary differential.
For the record, I do not work at a FAANG.
Interesting. I'm in South Africa, right now. The largest offer for a senior C# dev *right now* on www.pnet.co.za is R960k/a.
Twelve years ago, the GP that I was dating, who worked in a *state hospital* (i.e. not making as much as she could have in private practice) was making more than that.
I don't believe that doctors' salaries over the last 12 years have effectively been lowered. OTOH, if you know of places where they are offering more than R1.8m/a for senior developers, then by all means give me their contact details.
