>I always believe software wages shouldn't be more than a plumber or mechanic.

Wages in the trades have gone up a lot recently, at least where I'm from. Decades of parents telling their kids the trades are for losers lowering the supply of capable craftsmen...

And not all software will work as specialized tooling.

Calorie tracker apps? Sure.

Operating system kernels? Each with their own schedulers and allocators and ABIs and syscalls? Definitely not.