[paganel]

Yes, they are outside of your control but you just don’t realize it yet. The “financial success” aspect can become a thing of the past pretty quickly if a dot-com crash were to happen again or if the next recession were to bring the FANGs back into “normal companies” territory when it comes to their total valuation, and I assume the “social validation” aspect will become a thing of the past for most computer programmers pretty soon, especially if AI will end up consuming even more existing jobs among other the general populace.