It's still high paying, and still has a lot of job openings, for the A, B, and C level programmers (as it were, keep the "F-level" out). I see two likely posib

It's still high paying, and still has a lot of job openings, for the A, B, and C level programmers (as it were, keep the "F-level" out). I see two likely posibilities here. One, you classmates were all terrible -- i doubt that is true, but maybe one or two never 'got it' in industry. Two, most of them discovered that they didn't love programming, and if you don't love this line of work, it's really easy to hate it. Maybe they just found their passion elsewhere?