There are non-tech companies that give stock options and bonuses to software people. Many in those stodgy/established areas you mention.
As an anecdote, I use to live in Atlanta and every time I looked for a job, Delta airlines came on my radar.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries
This is accurate and in the same range other companies in Atlanta pay like Home Depot, Coke, etc.
https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate
Stock options are also mostly illiquid and you don’t know the value of what you’re holding.
My RSUs in a public company are vested every six months. I know the potential value of those options just by looking at my spreadsheet and I can see the value updated almost real time (the GoogleFinance function). How long have Stripe employees been waiting on their company to go public?
And a lot of companies thought they were “near liquidity” until the bottom fell out of the IPO market and the public got wise to thought that it might not be a good idea to invest in a money losing company where all of the upside had already been captured by the private investors.
And then the other out use to be getting acquired. But that’s not happening as much now because of the combination of high interest rates and more aggressive anti trust enforcement (I’m not saying whether that is good or bad).
Every startup I’ve ever spoken to has promised that they are near an exit. But when I was on the corp dev side of compensation, I valued that at $0 and made sure I was at market - which wasn’t hard as a journeyman CRUD developer living in metro Atlanta.
Now that I’m on the other side and have BigTech on my resume (cloud consulting department), startups are always trying to pull me in as an “architect” and occasionally a “CTO” (really just an overinflated title) and dangling “equity” at me. I would much rather have RSUs deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
Anecdotally, I have worked at companies that had ESOPs (does anyone do that anymore?), options in public companies, stock in a private start up and RSUs. Often they were worthless but at the end of the day they were also worth more than all the salary I got. You can't assume an option will be worth anything, but I think you should take them.
The longer you work at a private company with illiquid “equity”, the less diversified you are, waiting, hoping and praying that an exit event would happen and you aren’t able to sell when you need cash.
Just saying I personally know developers at companies very similar to the ones you're listing that get stock options. While nobody is getting rich, they do exercise them when they vest, for non-trivial amounts. Bonuses are common as well.
Stock options - private companies that give you options that aren’t liquid (usually) until an exit event at sone undefined time.
RSUs - a known amount of stock granted in a public company with a known vesting date.
I know people at those companies and they aren’t getting paid nearly as much at the senior level as even a mid level software engineer at one of the larger tech companies.
I have been on both sides and spent most of my time as an enterprise dev.
I didn’t even think about accepting the chance to apply for a role at $BigTech when a recruiter reached out to me that would have been $75K-$100K more than I was making if it meant that I had to move to Seattle.
I did take a permanently remote role that paid $60K-$75K more by doing a slight pivot from pure software development.
Everyone at my dinosaur financial company was getting them 15 years ago. Not a life changing amounts at my level though.
And stocks don’t always “go back up”. I would have hated for my RSUs to be worthless as my stock dropped 40% from its highs before they vested. At least I was able to sell them and diversify.