Why does having knowledge in specialized tools and systems not more rewarding than just being good at programming and general software development?

[u/W1v2u3q4e5]

Why are complex tools in domains of Cloud, CRM, ERP, ETL, etc seemingly less financially rewarded than people who are pure software developers/engineers? They are so difficult to learn and it takes YEARS to be proficient in them!

Examples include: AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Snowflake, RedShift, Redis, BigQuery, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, DigitalOcean, the list goes on!

Why don't these niche skills have faster career growth or higher-paying jobs/roles in comparison to being a skilled developer in general-purpose languages? Curious to know what experienced engineers think about this!

[u/blackedoutanubis]

AI tools cannot easily configure obscure options in complicated cloud and devops

Didn't even mention AI. Just said it only takes a couple of smes to enforce best practices across an entire organization so the demand compared to devs will be less

..........is much, much greater than writing REST APIs in some glorified CRUD app, or declaratively creating UI from Figma, using some open-source web framework with millions of resouces and community support, and even modern AI tools can scan entire codebases and generate much of required code with few prompts.

If that's what you think SWE do it make sense why you can't understand why you aren't getting paid at the same level.

Happy coping lol.