There's a lot of things at play.

Companies claim to care about your degree, but they don't. They have problems and they want it solved now. So practical skills counts more than that degree. If you can code, demonstrate it via code/github, you will get hired. You can learn and become great, but companies don't want to train/spend money on people. You have PhD, so via degree alone, you should be paid well enough, companies don't want to pay well enough, you are what they will call over qualified. Don't shoot for any job, narrow down, and do a quick catch up to whatever field you want to work in. If you want to do web dev for instance, focus on one language, php or python or ruby, learn a framework, build something. If you want to write C, learn how to do embedded programming for instance, if you want to do mobile, pick iOS or Android. Another way to go will be through a contracting/consulting company, they can charge more for you because of your PhD. They might not pay well, but at least you can get "real world" experience.

I don't think so. John is on a whole other level. 66.7 lines of code an hour is a just over a line a minute. One line a minute. Yup, I believe he cranked it out, read about him. He is a machine. Sure, many of us are not that good, and perhaps average out 5 or 10 lines an hour. He write's code like we write sentences. I just wrote this in under a minute. Some people are that good.

Or fix the broken software.

Yes, there are no shortage of "coders", but there sure is shortage of "computer scientists and software engineers" Most companies need the later not coders. If you wanted someone to modify your wordpress site, maybe a coder will suffice.

You are a fucking idiot. MOVE. Yeah, I live in the suburb of Detroit. I bought a 4 bedroom house with 1/4 acre for the price of a car. Mortgage free. I make decent money doing tech stuff, and save more than most of my peers in SV. Why? Because no mortgage. Don't have to deal with commute, I'm not in Detroit, it's pretty safe, decent, yeah, cold sucks, economy is not the greatest. But IT folks don't have problem getting job, and pay is good. Sleeping in your van for 8 years? You my friend are an idiot. No one is punishing you or doing anything to you, you are the one who has made the choice and choose to suffer.

Kinda of like computer science, it's suppose to teach a lot of useful things. Yet most people get a degree and can't write a freaking linked list from scratch, let alone implement trees. If you are lucky, they might be able to write up a simple sorting algorithm. Titles mean nothing, output is the only thing that counts in this world. MBA, CS Degree, any certification, whatever.

Yes they can. Try making use of a CPU with 8 cores and writing your threaded application in assembly. Someone with a compiler in a higher level language will kick your ass back and forth. The simpler the arguement the truth your argument holds, but as CPUs get more complex. Nope! Look at how difficult game programmers found it to program for the PS3 Cell architecture. Try having them write an entire game in assembly. Ha!

For PHP pick Symfony and just Symfony. For Python Django, For Ruby Rails. It's that simple. Symfony is beautiful PHP code, it's huge and has a much higher learning curve, but it's not going anywhere. Hell, Laravel uses some Symfony components.

15+ hour flights to get to a destination is now a freaking nightmare. No wonder first class on those flights cost 5 figures.

NSA has your theraphy sessions. It's true that face to face your therapist might hide a tape recorder, but online? No matter what, there will be that feeling it's being logged. Most chat/instant messengers allow for a logging option. NSA will certainly be logging these.

afterall google revealed a good amount on how they go about building their data centers and keeping it cool. But then again, contractors...

one day the crowdfunded police force will fight the "lawful" local police force and the crowdfunded police force and their donors will be labelled "errorists"

Well, I would consider that an assembly language not lua code. It's kinda like the languages that compiler to javascript. Those codes are not meant to be read or modified by human.

People get forced to write in C++ or Java, people are rarely forced to write lisp, so when they write lisp codes, they enjoy it hence rarely do you hear WTF and oh, everyone rolls out their own library.

PHP is not C with dollar signs. Syntax alone doesn't make a language. Behaviour does. C is very small, PHP is huge. C the language is small and separated from the standard libraries. PHP and it's libraries are the language. C's closeness to bare metal matters, function, references, allocating and freeing memory. no dictionaries. having to build any complex data structure from the ground up, not the same or related. When I program in C or PHP, my mind mode is not the same in any way shape or form. I can program in PHP carelessly and lazily, with C. I proceed cautiously because I don't want to have to fire up the debugger to chase a run away pointer. I won't call PHP a nice language, but nice code can be written in it. I won't call C a nice language because it can be beautiful. The beauty of C for me is the dense/speed, the things I will consider beautiful in C, if you did it in PHP, I would fight you.