We should maybe talk about high-supply and low-supply skills instead.
Another reply said nurses are "highly paid" because they make an average of $70-100k. That is laughable. I made more than that at my first job, at a no-name tech company, when all I knew was jQuery and 4 HTTP verbs. Or compare the valuation of any medical tech, or biochem, or materials sciences company compared to the latest photo sharing phenomenon slapped together by some hungover Stanford grads. How much do experienced chemical, or mechanical, or civil engineers make compared to new grad software devs? Who's more "skilled"?
Supply and demand is where it's at. It's pretty easy to increase the supply of janitors or line cooks, so their pay sucks, even though demand is always strong and the work isn't particularly easy or pleasant. There are countless musicians and actors in the world, far more than there could ever be demand for. So their pay, on average, also sucks.
Source: after 10 years of being a star performer and job hopping I have nearly tripled my salary…to a little more than 100k. New hires are making less than half that at my current company.
And no that's still quite low for a software developer in flyover country. It might be a good wage compared to median wages for everyone, but only because everyone else has lower wages too (to be fair, offset by lower cost of housing too).
If you know at what company I can do better without relocating, I'd be delighted to hear it.
> It might be a good wage compared to median wages for everyone
It's not even really that, it's a normal middle class professional wage, though the high end is good. We've had juniors leave to pursue other careers...one (who'd actually done fairly well, closer to 100k than 50k) left to be a nurse, because he'd make more money. Software isn't really that great a field unless you plan to move somewhere like California.
"Supply and demand" is highly regionally dependent.
My resume is all Silicon Valley/Bay Area tech, so my inbox has more of these opportunities. It might be harder at the beginning but you only need one of those jobs to establish that "pedigree" (it's dumb, I know).
Nursing - highly paid (https://nursinglicensemap.com/resources/nurse-salary/).
Game development - highly paid (https://builtin.com/salaries/dev-engineer/game-developer)
School teaching - low/medium pay - mostly for political reasons (i.e most are state employees).
Music and art paid like shit even when it wasn't infinitely reproducible.
Clean a house: Yeah, probably. Clean houses well enough to be paid for it: Probably not. Clean houses, well enough to be paid for it, 40 hours a week, for years: Very unlikely. That takes not just the skills to actually get each house professionally clean, but the mindset to be able to handle that sort of work for long periods.
Work construction: Almost certainly not. While not all construction requires heavy lifting, most does, and most software developers are not in good enough physical shape to do that on a regular basis without doing serious damage to their bodies. Not to mention the care and precision required to build things that will both look good and last.
Because "be able to do this job" doesn't just mean "has the basic understanding of how the mechanics of it work." It means understanding the details and nuances, being willing as well as able to do it for long periods of time, and being able to do it to a professional standard, not just "good enough for me".
Some businesses are built around the fact that most of their workforce will be composed of untrained people with 0 qualifications and very high turnover. See Amazon warehouse jobs, most fast food places. Lots of retail jobs.
The problem is that too many people are still stuck in classist, neofeudal mindsets and equate "working in a low skill job" with "being an inferior person, not worthy of respect/dignity/decent wages/a comfortable life/etc".
That's reaching a bit. I worked construction for years before starting a software career. There's lots of construction jobs that don't require a whole lot of heavy lifting. In fact, there are probably more of them that don't than do. And you probably overestimate the lack of health of office workers.
The weird thing that has happened is the "collegification" of skills. Unless the job requires an undergrad or, even better, a graduate degree, it's apparently not skillful.
Neither of these are the case: Some jobs require significantly more skill and training than others, but no job is unskilled.
And, as others note, the idea that jobs that require less training give you more time to yourself is just ludicrously out of touch with reality. Not only are they more likely to be jobs that expect you to work grueling hours, they also pay so little that many people who work them must work more than one every day just to pay the bills.