I've been coding since I was 12, I have flow days where it's just an absolute pleasure. But on a bad day where I never hit flow, it's brutal. It's so hard to force myself to focus. And often when I come back the next day, the code I wrote is absolute shit and I spent a good chunk of the next day just debugging it.
So yeah, echoing those who say not easy.
The other piece of it, is that I actually think a lot of software engineers are massively underpaid. I was at my last job for 7 years. My total compensation, including benefits, options and what have you, was probably less than $1 million (over 7 years mind you). But I can draw a direct line between work I did and the enablement of millions of dollars of ARR. The company probably got anywhere from a 5x or a 10x return from their investment in me. I was paid a little under market, but not so far under market that I'm that different from the norm. I worked on some particularly high impact features in terms of return, so that line is particularly clear for me and not all of my peers there could say the same -- but a lot of them could, and even for the ones where it was less obvious it's still true. As software engineers at a software company, our work is ultimately essentially. The companies don't exist with out us.
As a class, given that, we're still underpaid ;)
