You’ll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. So how to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

— 80000hours.org Career Guide; Benjamin Todd, April 2016

You’ve probably heard that before. At a certain scale, numbers are hard to internalize, so let’s compare it with another figure:

Students across the OECD receive an average of 7 634 hours of compulsory instruction during their primary and lower secondary education

— Education at a Glance; OECD, September 2023

The time you spend on your career is roughly 10 times what you spent in compulsory¹ education. Imagine that experience, day by day, 10 times over.

The good news is that, unlike most compulsory education, you can choose different paths for how you’re going to spend that time.

The choiceLink to heading

Assuming you don’t want to spend those 10 school-lives being unhappy, whether fresh out of school or switching careers, you might want to weigh your options.

We can do this by looking at the options and deciding which one provides the most “value”.

For “value”, the ideal metric could be “Subjective Well-Being” (SWB), a scientific construct which roughly means “an inner sense of happiness and fulfillment”. This is the standard for scientific research on what you might simply call “happiness”, or “a good life”.

As a software engineer, I’ll be focusing on software engineering, but we need some interesting alternatives to compare. It turns out most people want to be pilots, lawyers/policemen, nurses/doctors, and entertainers, so that’s what we’ll compare with.

There are several aspects of a career that influence SWB, there are those:

1. you say have “value” (job security, own schedule, salary),
2. you act on as “valuable” (interest, work-life balance, salary), and
3. give measurable “value”

Instinctively, the first two seem like the most important ones, but the only one that really matters is the measurable outcome².

So which aspects of a career do influence our Subjective Well-Being?

SatisfactionLink to heading

There’s plenty of evidence that job satisfaction has significant impact on SWB: it makes sense that to feel good, it would help if you were satisfied with the work.

However, it’s hard to find granular enough data on job satisfaction by occupation/career.

Yet occupational group is one of the most important explaining variables of Work Engagement, a significant factor of Job Satisfaction:

Work engagement is defined as “a positive, fulfilling state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption”
[…]
Occupational group and industry were relatively the most important factors associated with work
engagement, explaining 68.1% and 17.1% of all the explained variance of the model, respectively.

— Who is Engaged at Work? A Large-Scale Study in 30 European Countries; 2019

Your occupation/industry explains around 85% of how fulfilled you will feel with the work.

According to that study, “Professionals” is the second best groups to be in, which includes Software Developers, but also doctors, lawyers, and researchers³, so it doesn’t narrow it down among other top careers. The group “Managers” takes the top spot.

So the best we can do is non-academic data, which is more likely to be biased, have inconsistent definitions, or have problematic methodology. But we work with what we have!

unstandardized dataLink to heading

Here are some sources in no particular order:

Jobs with the highest job satisfaction in 2024:

1. […]
3. Software Developer - with an overall rating of 3.86 out of 5
4. […]
10. Physicians - with an overall rating of 3.69 out of 5

— The careers that make Americans happiest, based on 750k employees; career.io, 2024

expand analysis

3rd best overall, that sounds nice! Data scientist (which I consider a form of software developer) is 1st by happiness among high-paying.

Categories come from the top 50 occupations with highest employee count according to BLS, which is great⁴. But they use the average rating on Glassdoor as the metric for happiness, a method which has many problems, but there is positive correlation

Doctors are 10th in that list, as “Physicians”. Pilots, lawyers are nowhere to be found, but this is more likely to be because they don’t make the cut of top 50 occupations by employee count, than a significant result.

[Job satisfaction]
Physicians: 80%
Commercial Pilots: 77%
Lawyers: 68%
Computer Software Engineers, Applications: 57%

— The Most and Least Meaningful Jobs; Payscale

expand analysis

A satisfaction of 57% is in the bottom 22% of occupations in their list, with median satisfaction of 68%. Not very good.

Unlike the previous article, very specific occupations like “boilermakers” and “slot key persons” bloat the list, pushing software development down. They also don’t give any indication on how they got these numbers: for all we know, all of these have a sample size of 1.

In this list, lawyers have 68% satisfaction, pilots 74-77%, and physicians 80%. All significantly above computer programmers, which are all lumped into one category

[self-rated happiness:]
[pilots: 3.6/5 (top 15%)]
[doctors: 3.4/5 (top 34%)]
software engineers: 3.2/5 (bottom 46%)
[lawyers: 3.0/5 (bottom 7%)]

— Are software engineers happy?; CareerExplorer.com

expand analysis

That’s somewhere in between bottom 22%, and 3rd best from previous articles. Sounds alright, but not very positive.

As for other careers, the order is very different than those in previous articles, and by a wide margin

The story changes if we filter by “attainable careers”, where JavaScript developer is 4th best out of 121, and Web Developer is 13th overall. But we can’t cherry-pick like that: pilots, lawyers, and doctors are not in these 121 “attainable” jobs, and neither is software developer as a whole. You do find some healthcare workers.

[…] 17 popular jobs with the highest job satisfaction rates[:]

1. Physician
2. Software engineer
3. Software developer
   […]
   
11. Flight attendant

— 17 of the Happiest Jobs (With Duties and Salary Information); Jamie Birt, Indeed

expand analysis

Not only is software the second best by satisfaction, it’s also the third best!

This again highlights the specificity problem⁴, those should not count as separate. They also got their data from Glassdoor, but ended up with a significantly different order compared to the career.io list. They don’t explain it, but the reason seems to be that they sort by salary

Pilots and lawyers didn’t make the list, but flight attendants are 11th, and doctors are 1st.

It’s inconsistent: software development does rank very well, often above the other careers we mentioned, but sometimes below.

I mentioned that occupation has a strong effect on job satisfaction, yet we don’t see significant differences among these already high-satisfaction jobs.

interest fitLink to heading

That doesn’t mean satisfaction is irrelevant when picking between these careers, only that average satisfaction won’t help in choosing between the ones we’re comparing with.

We still have some useful metrics:

Results revealed a statistically significant, positive relation between interest fit and overall job satisfaction

— Interest Fit and Job Satisfaction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

If you’re interested in the work, your job satisfaction is likely higher. This study claims a correlation of 0.2: not a strong effect, but definitely a noticeable one.

Intuitively, that makes sense: if you’re interested in tech, mathematics, or games, you’re more likely to be happy if you’re a software developer than someone who isn’t. But if you’re just looking for a job for the money, and aren’t at all interested in these topics, you can still be a satisfied developer.

SalaryLink to heading

Work is not only about having purpose and feeling good, it’s also about having capital to spend on the other joys and needs of life.

For developers, this is not a contested metric. But let’s check our assumptions.

I took the best data available (BLS OEWS, May 2024), and compiled a quick and dirty google sheet to make it easier to explore.

[median wage by occupation in $/hr:]

1. Family Medicine Physicians: 114.61 $/hr
19. Lawyers: 72.67 $/hr
41. Software Developers: 63.98 $/hr

— Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Query System OEWS; U.S. Bureau of Labour Satistics, 2024

Where are pilots? BLS leaves pilot data blank, because it doesn’t keep track of values above 115 $/hr, so it would be above physicians⁶.

To further bring developers down, the US is known to give disproportionately high salaries, so this is not globally representative.

At first, developer salaries seem to be the worst of those 4 occupations, but that’s not the end of the story: those categories are quite narrow, there’s many different kinds of doctors, lawyers, and programmers.

It makes sense that a neurosurgeon earns more than your average developer: looking at narrow definitions only gives you an idea of a “maximum” for each field, it’s not a good indicator of what going for that career path might look like. So let’s zoom out a little:

[median wage by occupation in $/hr:]

2. Computer and Mathematical Occupations: 50.89 $/hr
3. Legal Occupations: 48.07 $/hr
5. Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: 39.95 $/hr
16. Transportation and Material Moving Occupations: 20.55 $/hr

— Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Query System OEWS; U.S. Bureau of Labour Satistics, 2024

Development related jobs are the “Computer and Mathematical Occupations” category. It might seem broad from the name, but it’s a very reasonable grouping. It’s relatively easy to jump between occupations in this group.

What we see is that the order has flipped! The category for pilots is at the bottom, then doctors, then lawyers, then developers at the top, just before management professions.

That’s because, while the category for developers is representative of developers, pilots are in the same category as taxi and bus drivers. To a lesser extent, this same effect is seen in lawyers and doctors.

If there is such a thing as a true ranking⁷, it’s somewhere in between the two lists.

An important take-away is that by entering software engineering, you’re almost guaranteed a high-paying salary, while you can’t say the same for the other fields. A small fraction of people that intend to become e.g. doctors, become doctors, while it’s hard to fail as a software engineer⁸.

The graph is sorted by median (blue), which is more representative of the average career, and in this category it’s the second best overall, much higher than the national median of 23.80$/hr BLS gives. By average (red), we get a similar result at 56$/hr, well above the national average of 32$/hr.

You’d be doing a lot better than most people in your country, if you live in the US. Whether that’s twice as rich or three times as rich might not end up mattering, it’s a choice only you can make.

If instead you’re driven by ambition, consider that, normally, senior google developers (L5) make ~200 usd per hour. That’s much higher than the median physician, and an attainable position if you’re dedicated.

starting salaryLink to heading

Even though software development is high-paying, I recommend some level of humility, at least for the next few years while we recover from the economic effects of COVID.

Your starting salary won’t be the median salary, but remember to compare that with the starting salaries of other occupations. According to BLS data, at least 75% of employed in the category make 36$/hr, which is more than what ~75% of all U.S. employees make.

This is again hard to compare with the other careers we mentioned, because e.g. the bottom 25% of earning doctors have already gone through 11-16 years of training, while the developer they’re being compared with might have been on the job for 1 year, and not attended university.

In practice, for the other careers, the comparable starting salary is negative and steep!

initial costsLink to heading

[…] the average price of an undergraduate degree and medical degree [is] a whopping $364,536

— How Much Does It Cost to Become a Doctor?; TJ Porter on The White Coat Investor, 2023

The average total cost of law school is $217,480.

— Average Cost of Law School; Melanie Hanson on educationdata.org, 2025

It costs $105,000 to [be licensed as an airline] pilot if you’re starting with zero experience

— How Much Does it Cost to Become a Pilot?; thrustflight.com

A bachelor’s degree in computer science costs $15,000 to $60,000 for on-campus programs

— Is a Computer Science Degree Worth It for 2025? Imed Bouchrika, Phd on research.com

But the good news are not over for developers: around 20% of professional developers don’t have a bachelor’s degree. Unlike the other 3 careers, you can get great software developer jobs with little to no financial investment.

ConclusionLink to heading

Is that it? These can’t be the only factors.

They’re not, but they’re by far the most significant ones, that you have control over. Job Satisfaction and Salary are the best predictors of Subjective Well-Being.

You spend most of your life at work, and reaping benefits of work. Intuitively, it makes sense that Job Satisfaction and Salary are the main factors.

What about work-life balance and job security?

These and other factors are baked into what is measured in Job Satisfaction. Job Security does play a special role: if it’s very hard to get the job, the many that didn’t reach their goals are not fully accounted for.

Can you guess which career is by far the easiest to get into, of the ones listed? And no, AI isn’t taking developer jobs.

I hope this article was helpful, whether to help reassure you of a choice you’ve made, or to avoid making choices that will leave you in debt.

FootnotesLink to heading

1. I couldn’t find a direct source that includes the rest of secondary education. Linearly extrapolating to 12 years gives you 10,178 hours, so a career is 8x the amount of hours. ↩

2. When buying a used car, you may say you chose it because 1. it’s “a classic”, while really you bought it because 2. it had a nice paint job and the salesman seems to like you, but what will predict whether it’s a good choice is 3. the mileage and service history. ↩

3. Pilots are in the third best group: “Technicians and associate professionals” ↩

4. It’s great because they didn’t try to make their own categories. But it has problems, because BLS data still has specificity problems, see my explanation here. ↩ ↩²

5. “Elementary occupations” was the group least correlated with job satisfaction. I’m sure many of these are happy people, these are indicators of trends in a group, you can’t make assumptions about individuals! ↩

6. Pilots are paid differently and don’t fit well into the metric. The actual hourly wage might be as low as 20% of what BLS indicates: https://ctipft.com/how-pilot-pay-works/ . BLS also doesn’t include figures for some doctors doctrines because they’re too high. “Family Medicine Physician” is not actually the highest-earning according to BLS. I don’t account for this in the spreadsheet, and you’ll see why it doesn’t matter if you keep reading. ↩

7. Which ranking system is “right” depends on many subjective and individual factors, such as how ambitious you are, your initial resources, and your ability to learn. While dreaming of an ideal life sounds nice, very few people get there, and planning for the case that you don’t fully get there is the sign of a wise person. ↩

8. This is a heavy simplification. While the vast majority that set out to be doctors, pilots, and lawyers don’t end up achieveing their goal, software engineering also has a steep initial drop-off, to do with discipline and ability to self-learn. But if you’re at least a little motivated, and find the right people that can guide you through it, that’s much easier to overcome than extreme tuition fees and years of study. ↩