This is how it is for other professional industries. As an attorney, you can lose your license for sharing any profits with someone who isn't a lawyer. I believe states typically require accounting and engineering firms to either be wholly or two-thirds owned by such professionals as well.
There are plenty of things that could be done better now by non-lawyers with the help of lawyers (look at Rocket law).
While I know HN is probably SV and software biased, saying "only" $120k comes across as out-of-touch for the way most people live. For comparison, the median SF lawyer makes $191k according to BLS data. I could not quickly find 90 percentile data for the area.
And your number is correct according to Census data.
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...
The average person does not develop software and does not live in a major city. If somebody is making double the median wage and 2.5x the average wage and complaining about keeping a roof over their head, they can probably expect some sideways glances. It's like when people complain about the difficulty of making ends meet once they make their Lexus payment and pay their kids private tuition bill. The subjective struggle may be legitimate but it's still out of touch with the experience of most people.
What states are these, Canadian states?
In the US, many many many SaaS shops are wholly owned by businessmen / bean counters. It's like, weird, to be an engineer who runs a software company.
> SaaS shop
Now, I get we like to refer to ourselves as Software Engineers, but surely you understand he means actual certified engineering firms, not groups of code monkeys, right? Software is virtually never engineering, you'd have to get to a situation like flight control software before you're doing anything legit
[1] https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/engineering-fir...