Okay, I’m going to be a little bit far out there. A lot of this seems to be grounded in the negative. “How to deal with x” how to “do y when z has failed”. Some of it technical and some of it interpersonal. Why have we created this sphere around programming? What makes /this/ profession so different from any other? And my believe is: nothing. It’s not hard. It’s not better. It won’t “eat the world”. Heck it probably…
As for not hard--I don't know. We have an unusually high paying career, which companies do not do out of the generosity of their hearts. They have a limited supply of people that can do it. Quite a few people show no aptitude at all. At the high end, it merges into pure computer science, with an essentially unlimited amount to know. So, you can draw badly, or become a professional artist. Certainly, a person can program badly, but I don't think you can call it "not hard" any more than you can call anything else "not hard".
I wouldn't, and don't, romanticize it. It often just sucks. And programmers can often come with pointless, inflated egos from some view that they do something special, and I would like to see a check on that and those pointless egos deflated. But "not eating the world" and "not hard" don't really check out, from my perspective.