I've recently returned to professional programming after working in another profession for 10 years. My former profession (let's call it "medical transcription"

I've recently returned to professional programming after working in another profession for 10 years. My former profession (let's call it "medical transcription" for the sake of my anonymity) is a dying profession, and is being replaced by a combination of technology and global outsourcing. Now, with relatively few exceptions, the only people who can actually make a good living at medical transcription are the master networkers and salespeople. And even though they present themselves as being "successful" at making a good living at medical transcription, what they really are making money doing is selling courses and books to people who want to get into the (dying) profession. Of course, they never mention to those people that it's increasingly difficult to make a decent living at medical transcription. This isn't the first time I've watched social butterfly networkers and salespeople take advantage of people and engage in ethically dubious conduct, so I have a bad taste in my mouth regarding networking. I'm also an introvert, so I'm naturally very bad at networking. That said, I also realize that I could be doing much better financially and professionally if I had a strong network of friends and colleagues, particularly as I'm starting at a new profession in my 40s. It's frustrating. EDIT: Changed a few sentences to make it clearer that the dying profession I'm referring to isn't programming.