Ive been in this field since 2006. It was always hard to find a job, and I always had to send out like 100 resumes and do 20 interviews, despite having high qualifications. The compensation was never anything remotely like I expected or had read about. In 2012 with 5 years of experience, a BS degree, and a GPA of 4.0, one company gave me an offer for 48k, 48k!. By 2018 the highest I was making was still only 80k, just before inadvertently changing fields. The only way to make any money in this field was to aggressively negotiate offers and to change jobs. Nobody was ever giving you a promotion or a raise. Nobody really respected your qualifications, grades, performance in the company, or abilities. I didn't really respect the abilities of my coworkers either. I looked at their code and it was very sloppy like they took random things from stack overflow and other coworkers in the most inefficient way using none of the software engineering principles I had learned in school.…