The same day I quit the retail job someone told me that they thought doing online sex work is "exploiting myself." The work isn't exploitative, especially when compared with these low-wage positions where they overwork and mistreat employees.
https://www.businessinsider.com/great-resignation-teacher-onlyfans-bbw-model-money-jobs-work-careers-2022-1
I get that you're mostly talking about science, engineering, and math students, but you do realize that the T stands for Technology (often a shorthand for computer science and IT), right? Also, I think it's shitty to lump software engineering in with finance as if they're equally worthless fields.
(Side note: I do want to get out of software and into engineering, but what's holding me back is the necessity of getting into grad school to pursue that, not a lack of financial means.)
My perception of the software industry is that you make more money wasting time on stupid bullshit like being the guy building up the metaverse for facebook, or working on tools to more effectively advertise online than doing cool necessary stuff. Or working on ways to integrate twitter on a smart fridge. Or most of IoT.
The tech behind Alexa is cool but also it's depressing that it only exists to get the advertisers into your home.
I'm not lumping in things together based on being equally as bad/useless, because in my mind working for raytheon is by far the worst but is useful in actually making something. And software engineering would still need to exist a lot more than finance under communism (but everything open source) so it definitely has its use. But the applications that actual useful/cool tech is used for is stupid. And it's stupid all the time/energy that parallel development wastes, basically everyone trying to develop a self-driving car which would be a great feat of engineering, but wasted because it would just cement the car further over funding functional public transit.
I just think everyone working at facebook and some (not all) working at google is a waste of manpower.
EDIT: also in my mind tech includes technicians and machinists and those types of people who are skilled labour but not with 4 year degrees, and computer science is under science because it is a sort of research.
People keep saying "walk with your feet" but 99% of my job opportunities are basically just inventing new unnecessary and useless ways to be a middleman or a gate keeper.
Yes and no, really. There are software engineers doing high-end GPU computing stuff for things like drug design, which are genuinely valuable (or at least should be--drug companies often chase drugs of questionable value to society) that get paid better than do the people working on any of the stuff you mentioned. At the same time, though, you're right that a ton of the money in software goes to work that is not actually valuable (my own job, working on health-care related software, is focused on the billing side of things, so I would classify it in the latter category, sadly).
In general, though, I agree with what you're saying here; I think it was just a bit inelegantly expressed in your original comment.
obviously software engineers aren't the "most" important labor (if it even makes sense to rank most jobs by importance), but imagine what we could do as a species if 80% of them weren't working on the next bluetooth dildo or blockchain-enabled smart faucet
depends how long a view you take as the thing you made will be used to destroy something make you net destructive rather than productive