The part about needing to continue your education daily is something a lot of non-CS/IT/programmers people don't understand. I know a lot of friends who want to get into a tech career (say, webdev) who don't get this. They think all they need to do is get a CS degree, or take a course and they'll be set for life.
A lot of people IN the industry (especially, but absolutely not exclusively folks who come from alternate backgrounds).
Ive been a consultant at several companies where other software engineers REFUSED to learn anything unless:
A) it was during work hours
B) the company provided a structured environment to learn the thing (usually in the form of paid 3rd party trainers coming on site).
Needless to say, those teams were far from successful.
There's also more and more folks coming in for the money (nothing wrong with that) expecting it to be a 9 to 5 job. It absolutely CAN be a 9 to 5 job given the right environment/company/structure, but no one in their right mind would pay average west/east coast software engineer salary for a 9 to 5 employee. The extra responsibilities, continual learning, possible on-call, etc, are all baked in those crazy 6 figure salaries everyone drool over.
There's totally a time and place for more typical schedule. Just expect to be paid accordingly. In the short term the market isn't quite adjusted to the idea that not all software eng roles are the same, so there's plenty of people who make 200k+ for doing essentially clerical work (that just happens to involve code) but its just a matter of time before that changes (its already happening).
