From a retired NASA engineer that worked on the Apollo program (and I greatly respected at the time): don't become a computer programmer, it's all going to India and there won't be any money in it.
For a lot of engineers this seems completely wrong but to many others in enterprise software this has become more true than false. Most of the old guard tech companies of decades past have moved the majority of their development opportunities offshore (Israel, Eastern Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and many more), abuse H1Bs (both as persons and in terms of policy), or to lower cost living areas of the US. Heck, even NASA’s largest personnel presence is in Alabama and Florida last I checked rather than NYC, SF, or even DC. While there are exceptions the rationale is that unless you have a business reason to have top engineers paid top wages and specifically in a large US metro, you likely are going to shift your tech labor force elsewhere. I think the message from the market is pretty clear - average / below average programmers have little competitive advantage over overseas labor of comparable overall technical output even if their communication skills are pretty decent, and the sky’s the limit practically for the talented - this is the reality of opportunity gaps in the US and has been for a long, long time.
I'd offer a softer version of this. If you are capable of becoming a programmer, you're probably capable of entering a field with better prospects.
This is a slightly ambiguous claim, because a "programmer" can be such a wide range of things. You can read a book on PHP and MySql, or not read the book and say you did, and call yourself a programmer.
But if you're the sort of person who can enter a decent college (no, not elite, just a proper college), read and write well enough to get good grades in your humanities general coursework, do calculus through differential equations, and major in computer science or engineering, then I think you're probably capable of entering a field with better prospects than programming.
I don't feel quite as negative about programming as you do, in that I don't think it's necessarily a bad job or a dead end (though I do think these risks are very present in programming careers), and there are still great careers to be had in it. But yes, I do agree that people capable of doing this are probably capable of doing a lot of things, and many of those things may be better paths.
There are plenty of opportunities here and most of the candidates are grossly incompetent. Many passably competent candidates confuse their status for greatness (Dunning-Kruger). As a result many companies persue visa sponsorship for immigrants at greater expense to supplement their hiring targets.
This level of incompetence should not be a surprise to anybody since software and software hiring are completely unregulated. There are no licensing, certification, or objective standard qualifications to define competence.
If in fact a candidate is objectively better than average they can go where ever they want. For these people the most challenging part of their career is finding a team/product that thinks like they do.
if taken at face value, this is sad. In fact, the entire field is moving in many directions at once. Some parts of some kinds of programming already did move to India from the US, but its not at all the whole story.
Seems like there is a hidden bit of advice about not becoming overly specialized or at the very least be nimble enough to be able to change your specialty quickly. Also seems like this will lead to "specialists" with shallow knowledge on average.
I see it as a bit of hidden advice of just because someone knows a shit ton about one thing, doesn't mean they known everything about everything, even if they sound like they do.
