I don't know how PMs are able to look at themselves in the mirror in the morning without gagging. Like headhunters and realtors, PMs have no tangible skills and don't actually produce anything. I'll stick with my people - the mud men.
The reason you're running into issues with being a contractor while working at the same level as independent contributors but not able to make the jump is due to the relationship your employer most likely has with your contracting agency. They cannot legally just poach you - you need to find a way around it by either being reassigned to another job (while keeping bridges open with the employer you actually desire to work at), interview at the "old" job after some no-poach period of time, and then quit the contracting agency.
Which BTW isn't much of an area to compete with. I have heavy firsthand experience here and the H1B ideals as implemented are a fucking JOKE. Corporations are using it to play a watered down indentured servitude game while the contracting agencies are basically a vig-taking middleman all the while providing rote-memory non-detail-oriented massively sub-par H1B workers that the non-H1B people actually have to carry all the hard problem work for. It is absolutely insane, costing MORE money, and destructive.
You can't put passions and interests aside. If you don't have a passion to make money and count it each day , if you don't have a passion to constantly beat your competition, if you don't have a passion to learn from mistakes to always improve then you should never aim for the most lucrative position because that is not where you belong and you won't make it.
That is nonsense. Sorry buddy but I ain't buying your story. If nobody benefits this action would not be going on to start with. Next, H1B holders are not all the same. There are varying degrees of intelligence and work ethics. The real devils are the agencies. And finally there is a real demand for low skilled work in the US that Americans are not willing to touch simple as that. Else there would be no H1B workers in your country.
Of course, I wouldn't argue with that at all. However, that wasn't really my question...I'll try to rephrase it better. Assume there are x number of CS skill sets to choose from and we have x freshmen. All the freshmen have equivalent intellectual abilities and their passions uniquely match up with one of the disciplines covering all of the possibilities with zero overlap. Which skill set is most likely to provide the highest median income if we had 10,000 freshmen per skill set instead of 1?
I dont think it matters. You should have a solid foundation in algorithms and data structures and finished programming projects. Just understand the basics (in any field) and its easier to pick things up down the road. As a student have more fun than worrying about jobs
that would either be a developer job at one of the large private technology firms (Uber, Alibaba,...) or working as a specialized developer at a high frequency trading firm or hedge fund. Why I do not include running your own startup or being entrepreneur is because you asked for the highest median income. Starting up a business is a high-risk - high-potential payoff proposition resulting in 99 who fail and 1 person who succeeds resulting in a way higher mean income but relatively low median income level. But again, we are talking about the total picture here. Only you yourself know in which bracket you can place yourself in terms of skill set, intelligence, passion. If you do not believe you can compete with the best then your chance of success is close to zero to actually do compete with the best. Your chances will then be much higher (as well as your expected payoff/income) to aim for a position somewhere in the middle or lower ranks. If you have graduated from community college, and/or do not have a fantastic coding project to show off then you have virtually zero chance to even land an interview with Google, Uber, StackExchange, or other technology firms.
I am not sure I agree with that: I find it incredibly hard to imagine to embark on a successful career unless a) you either are willing to put ethics and moral values aside and engage in illegal or questionable practices (example, be a developer for a large porn or online dating website, or take part in some kind of illicit trade), b) or you are blessed with being born into wealth and get a fair shot at life without having to work hard, or c) you work very hard and follow your passion from childhood onwards, which means to work like a horse and strengthen your skill set in high school, college, and thereafter. I can only repeat that I think what is taught to the broad masses in the United States is one of the biggest ideological lies of our times, which is that everyone has an equal opportunity and to just enjoy life and good things will follow. If you define a good life as driving a Toyota Camry, watching your baseball games in front of your 46 inch LCD screen, having 2 computers, and working your 9-6/7pm job each day with 10-20 days of annual vacation days then that is great and I laud your contentment but that is certainly not how American media portray a "successful and happy lifestyle" to the masses on TV and in public media. If you aim for more then you gotta work harder and earlier than everyone else. There is no trade-off, imho, to this.