I left the actuarial field for basically the reasons you describe, but the characterization still strikes me as somewhat unfair. Actuaries reliably make significantly above the median US income right out of undergrad, and reliably double that income within a decade, working 40 hours a week, without needing to go to a target school or get an advanced degree. That alone makes it a good career by most objective standards.
Software engineering is sort of a trump card in that it looks better than basically any other career on paper, but everyone can't be a software engineer. And while the actuarial field draws from a similar talent pool as software engineering, I think most people who enjoy one wouldn't enjoy the other - the former is much more of a business-y profession. I personally find the work I do as a SWE way less interesting than the work I did as an actuary, even though I'm not big on memorizing formulas.
I suspect that SWE is becoming a bi-modal field. We often talk about SWE salaries pushing mid-> high six figures, but this is only true for experienced professionals working in very successful companies benefiting from large stock appreciations.
If the stock market was falling/flat for a few years SWE comp would not be as high. By definition, most SWEs will not work at Netflix. The current situation of stable, well paying, and public tech companies is unlikely to persist indefinitely.
I suspect the average US "Senior SWE" is lucky to retire after decades of work having broken $200,000 compensation.
For every 20-30-40something FAANG engineer making $300-500k+, there are legions upon legions of SWEs working at IT-as-a-cost-center non-tech companies making a fraction of that amount.
Yeah, that's a factor too. The actuaries had way better salary trajectories than the programmers we worked with when I was at an insurance company in the Midwest.
A survey I saw said actuaries have high job satisfaction. I had actuary and math colleagues in the risk dept (i was in diff group) and they loved running risk sims, programming, data visualization. In addition to high salary per hour, low stress, no bro-grammer environment or ageism, or shiny new web framework.
This could be outdated information that I have, but don't actuaries constantly need to study for their exams/certs? Does that fall outside of the 40 hour/week range, or is that done on work time?
The exam process probably takes something like 2000-3000 hours total, with roughly half done on company time. Exam season is really stressful and can go significantly above 40 hours/week between work and study time, but it doesn't add up to a ton of time when you amortize it over a whole career.
There's also a career-long continuing education requirement that typically boils down to 15 hours/year of seminars or webcasts, all done on company time.
You could argue that a lot of SWEs also have to constantly study leetcode on their own, outside of working hours. Especially if you are targeting many of the high paying companies that would pay substantially more than an actuary.
Even if you are fortunate not to have to do leetcode (i.e. frontend engineer interviews seem to diverge from leetcode problems nowadays), you still have to extracurricularly grind on coding in ways that you would typically not encounter during your normal work.
Software engineering is sort of a trump card in that it looks better than basically any other career on paper, but everyone can't be a software engineer. And while the actuarial field draws from a similar talent pool as software engineering, I think most people who enjoy one wouldn't enjoy the other - the former is much more of a business-y profession. I personally find the work I do as a SWE way less interesting than the work I did as an actuary, even though I'm not big on memorizing formulas.