You are a smart, college educated guy
Half the population has an IQ less than 100
Luckily coding is extremely easy for most of the jobs. If you can say what your program should do out loud you're already half way there. There is tons of work for low level programmers and people just throw money at them.
Just because it uses fancy terms like ML or AI doesn't mean that you're not just regurgitating the same methods over and over in the majority of jobs.
Not everybody needs to be a researcher designing or optimizing algorithms.
Even if you take some sub 100 IQ person. As long as they are capable of language as well as repeating steps somebody else has already taken they
will be able to pick up the skills required for low level programming jobs. They really aren't much different from stacking blocks or chopping wood.
Five years would already be far more than anyone could reasonably need when working part-time, but even if you round up to ten years that still leaves at least a few decades of high earnings for most people. But why bother learning something for 10 years if you don't know if it will pay off right? Wrong. And that's the problem.
There are countless other jobs that people can learn in similar amounts of time too. Most people just don't want to put in the effort needed once they are off work and I can totally get that. But that's everybody's choice and not something that the rest of us should be forced to compensate for.
And by the way, I am college educated because I chose that path. I also made sure that I chose a subject that was
guaranteed to provide high income if I put in sufficient effort, even though I would have much preferred studying something financially worthless but more interesting. And that's ignoring the overwhelming existential dread from even choosing a course coming from a dirt-poor first generation migrant family without any academics.
Even before I entered university I thought it would be out of my reach and the first lectures in Mathematics I attended were so far and beyond me that I was 100% certain that I would not make it to the end of the first year, never mind the end of my degree.
I could have also gone off to some apprenticeship or low-skill work right after school like a solid 99% of my childhood peers. They are literally so disconnected from reality that they wouldn't even believe that I was sent to a global elite university with a full scholarship (and not in the "wow good for you" kind of way, they literally called my parents liars when they told them
after being asked about my picture on Facebook).
Poor people on average clearly don't understand that they can change their own fate and outright reject anyone who against all the odds demonstrates the possibility. All of us who made it just "got lucky", somehow cheated others out of their money or are simply lying.
There's little that is more disgusting than people who are too afraid or lazy to even try moving forward berating others and trying to claim moral high ground while complaining about the obvious results of their life choices. If that was all then I would just shrug it off. But in reality it is precisely because of those degenerates that we have such high taxes and literally nothing to show for in return. And the fact that I have to either circumvent income tax entirely or be forced to pay for idiots with a complete and utter disregard for foresight is appalling.
But yeah, those poor people that chose to fuck around throughout their life. Let's all pity them and exacerbate the issue instead of very clearly pointing out their poor choices and making sure that others after them think twice about what they do with their lives.
Credit to all those who choose a simple lifestyle without shitting on those that don't.