I graduated into the dot com bust as a programmer and made it – you will too

I get that you're unaware of it. I was as well. I freelanced for a bit. For whatever reason that actually was easier to get. But then I tried to play it safe, and got into a year long apply-rejection cycle.

Ok then, you're doomed to failure. You have no hope of ever succeeding. Feel better?

Yeah but no less dense area stands alone. One person from a more dense area visits a less dense area and we're right back at it.

Survivorship bias. Our system is broken, humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure. Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...This will be another generation of hopeless dreamers lost in the looming financial depression.

Why is our antidote hope against the adversity of going against all the odds?. Congrats to those who made it but more recognition to those who failed and managed to overcome misery

Programming for the web is my primary career. I first got into it late 1997. I am astonished at how incompetent it is. The fact the OP made a career out of it and made some money is hardly amazing. For the level of talent required contrasted against the average compensation I am surprised not everybody is trying it. You too could be earning 6 figures in a low cost of living economy after completing a boot camp and 2 years experience not being any good.

Don’t really know how to do your job? No problem. After 30 years web technology standards have largely solidified and cross browser concerns are no longer noticeable. If you work on the front end a large framework and 10000 NPM packages can be pushed into a website to do all the heavy lifting. If that’s not enough jQuery is still a thing. If that’s still not enough the business will simply hire additional bodies to fill the gaps of accessibility and any original problems that might come up. The backend is pretty similar with Spring MVC, Maven, and tons of data packages that perform data or service handling for spring.

The last half of my corporate career has been spent trying to untangle the spaghetti mistakes of other developers who probably shouldn’t have writing any unsupervised code as opposed to writing original feature logic.

I know many developers have lost their jobs in the current economic crisis. This includes both good developers and really bad developers. In all the bad and disruption that comes from that I hope businesses will become more thoughtful about simply throwing money away on web technologies and developers.

Historically businesses have vaguely realized just how bad and incompetent their web technology is but never did anything to fix it. Some businesses, even large mega .coms, would go bust than fix it (and their business). Really the only answer ever applied was hire better talent without defining what that is and without any plan on what to do with or how to apply that new talent. That is a leadership/business problem and not a technology or talent problem. Hiring is not the answer but instead only feeds the problem. It makes sense though, bad leaders aren’t going to blame themselves for problems like this and it’s generally not their money they are throwing away on bad decisions and empty solutions.

Other industries have solved these problems long ago. They have things like broker/agent relationships, licensing, continuing education, and personal liability. The incompetence of software does not want any of this. They want the least possible effort to immediate high income.