Programming is not by any means a "fairly low rent blue-collar position".
It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who tasted glory once, and then fell off the technology curve into irrelevance and don't want to hop back on it.
Any profession where you can make $300-400K/year as an employee with ~5 years of experience, or over half a million as a consultant, would be considered fantastically lucrative by most of the world.
These $300k+ salaries you speak of are no more common than any other field where maybe 1/1000 makes this. HN is quite heavy with Silicon Valley coders at Google, Facebook, etc.
The 99.9% of the rest of developers are making $90k in the Midwest up to $150k in high cost areas on the coasts.
Yes this is certainly better than most other jobs, but considering a developer will hit the inflation rate raises by about 30, while other professions like doctors and lawyers tend to continue seeing large raises, I really don't feel software is a great gig, all things considered.
Mid thirties and I'm already seeing my first decades's go-to languages and frameworks becoming obsolete (Java, MVC, single RDMS, etc). Taking the massive amount of time to learn the new ones will not increase my pay one bit, but just give me another few years of employment.
It was great at 28 making $90k while most my peers were still in grad school and / or making $40k in crappy positions. But now a lot them are getting into mgmt, making partner, have a good book of customers, and have caught up. Even a few Fed and state workers I know with liberal arts degrees are hitting six figures with the gov't, along with job stability, pensions, and guaranteed raises. Meanwhile we get more H1Bs and offshoring.
1. The average salary in my area is $300 a month, after taxes. The only reason I'm not making $10K is because I'm lazy, and I prefer to play games. $2K after taxes (again, working from home) is something that's so easy I honestly feel I hadn't been working at all at the end of the month. $4K is almost as easy. I've done $8K but I didn't watch TV or play games.
2. Maybe even more importantly, I do not fear the future. I recently rejected a $8K / month job because I didn't like the project. I remember being afraid of losing my job as recently as three years ago, but it's like in a story about someone else. I have clients who send me emails every month about this or that issue - it takes me a day or two to solve it, and I charge them $300 to $500. Again - this is the average here; in fact, it's what my sister makes - and she works 8 hours a day, standing up, talking to customers, using a computer with Windows 95 on it. THIS is why I keep bugging everybody.
Well I don't think that's what the complaints have been about. I'm not sure if the complaints are even true but is definitely a more common view on HN these days. It's less what you say and I think more "people in X will do all this for an annual salary of about $1,000" so that's the end of the game now.
As far as the "pace of technology change;" I don't really see that. I don't count the rather comedic constant wheel reinvention in the JavaScript community really counts as really "technology change" or even think the Web mvc framework du jour rises to that level. So, ok let's look at general cs, what I see is fairly incremental changes in distributed systems, file systems, and so on. Ok let's consider the machine learning craze, but this has been a utilization of 50 year old methods in a much more distributed fashion -- the people who wrote the Statistical Learning textbook in the 70s probably don't think of this is as mega technological change, maybe more like "well, this is finally popular." So I dunno.
It has a very odd wage curve, though, where the vast majority of your salary increases will come in the first 5 years of your career, and the technologies that you became an expert in will be obsolete within 5-10 years. If you don't retrain, you'll be very much obsolete. That's behind most of the complaints on Hacker News; these were people who tasted glory once, and then fell off the technology curve into irrelevance and don't want to hop back on it.
Any profession where you can make $300-400K/year as an employee with ~5 years of experience, or over half a million as a consultant, would be considered fantastically lucrative by most of the world.