Born here in the US. Grew up in California. I would have loved to have it as good as our visa friend above (while in the US). Growing up poor can be rough. I ca

Born here in the US. Grew up in California. I would have loved to have it as good as our visa friend above (while in the US). Growing up poor can be rough. I can spin a sob story that literally has had folks from across the world reach out and say that they teared up. When I finally broke into programming as a career at nearly 30, my life changed. A couple years into it, I found out I was making 80% of a new hire QA dev on visa where their salary had to be posted in the break room or something. As a back end engineer who was part of a team of 4 writing code that was earning our company over $50M a year, I was surprised that she was making substantially more than me. Turned out minimum salary visa stuff protected her from my salary. I’m now doing better than most, but I’d expect that there are many like me who would just were/are unaware they could make it comfortably as a software developer. Not sure where I was going. Something about more poor Americans would accept those jobs and live crappy conditions if they new how to get them. Those conditions are just “life” for many of us.