My personal thoughts on this: For smart, generally capable people (ie, the people who actually become programmers), programming is a mildly bad but not terrible

My personal thoughts on this: For smart, generally capable people (ie, the people who actually become programmers), programming is a mildly bad but not terrible career. You make a decent salary, you can fairly easily find a new job in any major US city, and you don't have to wear a suit or do anything really dangerous or physically taxing. On the other hand, the upward mobility is quite low, the salary will never really be great, and you get little respect or social status (if you care about that).