Don't Call Yourself a Programmer

Or phrased differently, you get to work for a startup you believe in and enjoy instead of a soul-crushing megacorp, with (almost) no cost.

This counts as a win in my book.

Many are driven to stick with it because if they don't, they'll get deported.

Edit:

Are accountants high status? I'm not sure. They are generally regarded as making a fair bit of money but they are boring. Probably a bit more high status than a programmer, perhaps. But I wouldn't suggest to my accountant friends that they stop selling themselves as experts at accounting.

And anyways, high status = social status, and how is that relevant to any of your points? Social status is mostly useful for when you're trying to get laid (because that's mostly when you are trying to impress people) or prove something to your parents. We, as programmers, still get paid very well and are valued by many many companies.

The lack "high status" thing in comparison to doctors and lawyers is just because:

A) Laywers and doctors generally make more money. A lot of lawyers and doctors make over 200K. Programmers, not so much.

B) Laywers and doctors are almost certainly better educated than programmers. This education is validates a person in lots of ways, in that you are automatically learned about a variety of topics with which to converse with at parties, and that you are smart enough not only to perform as a lawyer/doctor but to achieve the level of education necessary to do so (unlike programming, where you only need to be good at your job and not necessarily good at 6+ years of higher ed).

C) The laywer and doctor professions have been around longer and are therefore safer. Doctors are the most ancient and historically valuable professions. Laywers, not nearly as much so, but for the past few hundred years they have emerged as a staple profession. I like law a lot but I would devalue lawyers over doctors a bunch.

D) It's harder to become a lawyer/doctor than a programmer, so it's a bigger achievement.

E) The jobs generally require more social skills than working with computers.

Programmers will probably never be a high status job because of the above reasons. But that doesn't really affect your argument, which is describing how you should sell yourself to potential employers.

I'd like to reiterate that I'd prefer to well rounded people who are good at programming and specifically good at our tech stack. That's the ideal. Take classic ASP.NET programmer and tell him to write a complex Ruby on Rails project and watch him flounder for months no matter how good he was at ASP.NET. There's just a lot to learn. Now, for someone who is more seasoned, used to unix, used to working with actual HTML+CSS+Javascript (instead of .net controls) used to writing tests, used to dynamic languages, that person will adjust fast, but not everyone will.