I went $230,000 into debt to become a doctor in America

This is like chum in the water for bureaucrats. Its basically a declaration saying "I'd work just as hard for even less".

The problem with "caring" professions is that once you're in the thick of it, its extremely hard to walk away from people in need regardless of the cost to yourself or your family. There are all too many people willing to take advantage of this.

For comparison, an average developer salary is about $100K/year. So that is a $150K difference. Taking into account net worth, I think it's pretty optimistic to estimate avg. engineer net worth to hover around $125K at age 30, while avg. doctor's net worth is at -$100K to be pessimistic.

Assuming that a developer and doctor is saving 25% of his pre-tax income which is respectively, 25K and $65K and putting it into an investment account that yields 8% annual return, after 35 years, a developer will have 6.5 million with $100K starting amount and the doctor 12.09 million with -$100K deficit.

So financially speaking, it's nearly 2x more monetarily ewarding to become a doctor or a lawyer over an engineer despite people's complaint about grad school debt and late start.