Yup.

"With no credentials I was able to work hard on my own for a year and then landed an entry level position with very good future prospects."

What other lucrative professional industry is this easy to break into?

> What other lucrative professional industry is this easy to break into?

It's only easy if you're an autodidact and have high-level English proficiency. In reality it's easy for the people it's easy for, but 95% of the population is still excluded.

Programming as a skill will be completely commoditized in the next ten years. But some developers will still make good salaries, because as the world gets more interconnected the value of being a winner in a winner-take-all market is only increasing.

Well, there are other skilled professions that pay well and are relatively easy to get into. Welding for example.

Welding looks pretty hard. I'd need a welder, and some welding stuff (IDK what it's called) and a bunch of stuff that people are OK with me welding to other stuff, and somewhere to keep all the stuff that won't go on fire from welding. Presumably some degree of hand eye coordination is required, should one wish to retain the use of said body parts. It's always seemed the sort of thing that someone like me should be kept well away from, preferably by s safety fence.

US avg. salary welder: $37,000

US avg salary software developer: $99,500

A simple mean doesn't fully illustrate what's going on there. Most welders are self-taught, and while their skills are more than adequate for what they're doing they likely don't have the skills necessary to (for instance) weld stainless steel or aluminum.

A welder who graduated from Tulsa Welding School with a year or so of training is likely going to start out somewhere around $50k. I have a friend who went there and specialized in underwater welding, and now he works for BP in the Gulf somewhere. His job consists of mostly inspecting the work of his juniors, and he makes about three times what I make as a software engineer.

> specialized in underwater welding...

> ...and he makes about three times what I make as a software engineer.

Hazard pay is coming into play here. For me, that's not worth it.

As I understand it, there is no shortage of divers. There is a shortage of divers with the specialized knowledge and abilities he possesses.

It's more dangerous than sitting at a desk, but realistically it's not as dangerous as it sounds.

I was scuba diving at age 12, it's not as hazardous as you'd think with proper training.

Yep, I'm open water certified so I understand the hazards. People still die doing it all the time.

I think my knowledge of welders might be biased. I'm from southern Louisiana, and most welders that I know work offshore making somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-60k without too much experience. Cost of living's low here, so that's a really comfortable salary. On top of that, oil companies do have good opportunities for advancement.

Programming is the profession with the least barriers to turn into a career. Most others has mandatory licensing, degrees, training, etc. How long does it take to be a doctor? A Lawyer? Most traditional engineering degrees? Heck working as a barber takes more effort in most states.

Hence a lot of people have problems with calling our field 'engineering,' when you compare the training and licensure of programmers with 'real' engineers. I personally like it, though I prefer programmer over engineer regardless.

This is also probably why there are so many just-plain-awful coders out there who don't belong in the same room as people who do things well.

There are "just-plain-awful" engineers in other fields of engineering also. I started my career doing mechanical and electrical design work before gradually switching to programming (and then getting a degree.) Engineers who don't understand gear ratios, tolerances, circuit design, etc.

Maybe a little more in the programming because that is where the money is at right now.

At the same time, disparities in practitioner quality are going to exist in every field, not just software development.

> Programming is the profession with the least barriers to turn into a career.

That's largely because its not a profession, by any of the usual definitions that separate a "profession" from a "job".

It's not.

You know how I got started in the restaurant industry?

A friend said, "Want to work at my restaurant?"

So I did.

Another friend, knowing I wanted to get into film, said "Wanna come work on sets with me?" Just like that. Foolishly, I blew 3 and a half years in school instead. But I didn't have to do any of that, I could've just gone to Cali and started working so long as I wasn't picky about what I did in the beginning.

I, like the author of the piece, have managed, with considerable cajoling, to get into an entry-level position at a software consultancy but even that took me 8 months of government-paid internship and another year of self-training before that, plus hours as a hobbyist programmer when I was a kid. It was basically luck, and persistence, that got me this job at all, most other software firms and recruiters took one look at my resume and passed.

Getting this job is one of the hardest things I have ever done. There's no easy route. As a self-trained programmer, I'm hampered heavily by the lack of degree, but a degree means 4 years minimum of schooling, and even some amount of study just to qualify to get into the university that I will do that schooling in.

I am, it's true, after all that, making more even with what is a pretty small salary for a coder, making more than I ever did cooking in the states. And I've got a very understanding employer, with a flexible schedule and benefits even as an entry-level grunt that are better than I ever dreamed of as a kid. But it's hardly been an easy or magic road to career success. I had to prove myself over and over, and still fight with anxiety over making sure I can do it again every day just to keep a hold on where I am, let alone move up from there.

Coding isn't for everyone, and while yes, I pulled it off so far, I still think the bootcamp/Codecademy/MOOC snake oil of "Buy our course for just €49.99 and become a rockstar coder!" shit is basically a pack of lies.

None of my friends have the whuffie to get anyone else a job like that. So I had to get the paid-for credentials just to get my foot in the door.

I could not now get anyone else a job, nor can any of my current or former technical-side co-workers. My career is owned and operated by the good ol'boy network of a completely foreign caste.

So you can't "just get a job" in this field. I don't know if you have noticed, but HN regularly features articles and blog posts about how incredibly broken tech hiring is these days.

All those people pushing young folks into learning how to code see it as the long-term solution to their perceived problem of not being able to find affordable skilled labor for their businesses. But the supply of skilled labor is not the problem. The problem is that the businesses are not only failing to look for it in the seemingly obvious places, but it is very likely they would not recognize it if they were literally handcuffed to a qualified applicant for a solid fortnight, in a survival challenge designed specifically to favor analytical personalities.

Rather than fixing the system to identify and match labor to business, they want to rearrange the entire world such that picking a random person off the street to do the job won't be a complete failure. They want everyone to learn how to code so they won't have to worry so much about their woeful inability to discern if someone is truly well suited for their open position or not.