Americans are their own little bubble again - I'd wager that most of the world's programmers don't live in US. Globally your average programmer will be someone writing utterly boring code making same salary as a teacher, maybe slightly above that if lucky. Happy to be proven wrong, but the whole "If you aren't making 6 figures as a programmer you failed at life" meme needs to go away - it's a tiny tiny sliver of all programmers that actually manage to achieve that.