I would bet that an extraordinary doctor can indeed touch millions. The best doctors reform the practices at their hospitals, improve the standard of care, and get brought in to do the same at other hospitals.

Programmers work in Medicine too. Specifically medical technology - things like Cat scans, MRIs, PET scans have probably saved many more lives than even the most extraordinary doctor.

Many of these devices were invented by doctors and implemented by programmers. The doctors, in many of these cases, were the ones who created most of the value.

When the idea behind a device is more like, "Here's how we're going to use magnets to align the polarization of water molecules in the body, measure those changes, and map those back to construct an accurate image of the inside of someone's body. Now program it for me.", the original inventor creates a whole lot more value than someone who says, "It's like Facebook for dogs. That uses PHP, right? Now program it for me."

It's not a matter of "touching" lives, is it? I mean, I think Amazon is great and all, and I'm really glad it's there, and kudos to the engineers who work on it. They've touch a million lives. But I think that Amazon's impact on my life is much less than the impact that a good doctor or surgeon would have, should I become seriously ill.

Extraordinary doctors and extraordinary engineers are paid much more than the average

That's because doctors and lawyers impact individual lives directly, and often profoundly.

Explain how any developer has done this recently.

We're hardwired to respect individual stories, not tales of aggregate success (affecting millions of lives in a small positive way)... which is why it's only when those small effects are made tangible by specific personal stories does it sink in.

This is why politicians talk about how the impacted the life of some small child or working mother, etc etc..