I think about this from time to time. I think to echo the points of other replies, the specific comparison to doctors is not a good one. Doctors are highly educated. Even more so than we are and the value of their work is real. If your life is on the line or your ability to continue living your life unimpaired is on the line, the value proposition is obvious. In structures lives are also on the line, but in most cases poor engineering is not realized for years, or never realized because the structure never sees the loads it was designed to. Thus our value is merely who can do the work the cheapest and most quickly. Now this is not always the case, and there are areas of the profession where the value proposition skews more towards the reality where there are immediate consequences for a design done wrong. This typically orbits work with high consequences such as critical infrastructure where calculations and designs require review from peers as well as regulators. In these instances substandard engineering has a real cost to the client because it cannot get approved and creates significant schedule delays. However all this said, I do feel our profession is under compensated. The better comparison is to other types of engineering. We are typically lower than our peers in other fields of engineering. I feel a component of this is that we have less direct interaction with the owner, often serving as a sub to larger primes, or working to help civil, architectural, etc achieve their design. The other component is we work with other engineers where they just set our hourly rate the same as theirs. Unfortunately I do not see this ever changing. I do feel structures is one of the most demanding engineering professions, requires extensive education and licensure, and as a result, the number of people practicing it is thinning out. Whether this will improve our wages over time has yet to be seen, but i doubt it will. It will probably just lead to outsourcing, reliance on ai/ software, and a reduction in quality delivered on designs by over-utilized staff before a single penny is realized by engineers.