[ajmurmann]

Programming had much better pay and benefits than most jobs. There is plenty of people who work multiple jobs and still are in awful living conditions. You should check out the book "nickel and dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich

Also keep in mind that the author of the article is going to a boot camp. He is not getting paid, but paying. Once he is done he will likely earn ~$100k and can move into better conditions. It's very unfortunate that the author never was able to talk to the people he lived with who already had a job and find out why they still live there. Maybe they were just saving a ton of money. I knew someone who was earning a good tech salary, but chose to commute every day from Dublin for hours. That guy chose to safe the money and bought a gold coin every month.