Current city has repressed wages across the board. It's a place with a "low cost of living" and several universities that pump out local students who want to stay here at any cost and a very healthy foreign worker scene.

Currently, I'm willing to move.

I've seen this happen many times. Not just to friends, but co-workers and people that I have met along the way.

In one case I had a friend who was hired by a former classmate to a local firm. After a year there they started hiring more programmers company wide. This friend refused to interview people who had graduated from our department or pass along resumes. Instead they started hiring other people from non-engineering departments that they thought they could train to program. This guy is now a C-level and still refuses to hire people that graduated from our department.

I'd wager that it's just a feature of my particular network and people I've come across. As my partner is the opposite, and their network helps each other out.

5) You might be a good programmer but your skillset in terms of technology stack(s) might not match up with what employers/recruiters are looking for.

We interviewed a junior dev a couple of years back who had exclusively RPM and mainframe experience. We're a .NET/C#/SQL Server/TypeScript/React shop, with a bit of R and Python thrown in outside of the core technology team.

I couldn't work out whether he couldn't get his head round our pair programming task (which isn't any kind of ridiculous invert a red/black tree type whiteboard problem) because he wasn't a good programmer or because the mental model was so different to what he was used to, and he really seemed to struggle with C#. I didn't give him a job because I thought the risk of having to let him go during probation was too high, which would have sucked given that he'd have been leaving a steady job to join us.

Contrast this with another interviewee who was a nurse, and a self-taught programmer, who really did seem to get it. He nailed our assessments, and we made him an offer. He joined us and has worked out really well.

It's not that I'm against hiring people with mismatched skills, or from an unusual professional background - far from it - but I need to see some glimmer of a good match during the selection process, particularly if somebody would be leaving stable employment to join us (not that we're unstable, but there's the probation period to successfully navigate) and/or - not really an issue now we're all WFH - they're planning to relocate to work with us.

However, humans are social creatures, and we get things done by cooperating with eachother, so I think it's fair to argue that those social skills are also pretty important for building software.

Like any other social activity or grouping, that can work well, or it can be toxic, but the need for those social skills as a software engineer isn't inherently evil. Likewise, the fact that people with "better" social skills often "do better" isn't necessarily wrong either because those skills are incredibly important for any cooperative endeavour, and particularly for leadership.

Obviously this isn't some top 40 program. Had I known then what I do now, I would have applied to some of those programs.

Back then, I wasn't aware of other programs or even names of universities known for computing (other than MIT). I came from a small town that didn't have many opportunities for kids interested in tech in the late 90's early 00's. So you pretty much went to one of the State Universities.