> Historically, teachers made relatively good pay and were respected. That was when it was a mostly male profession.
Also education was a privilege back then. Teachers were less, students were less. Teachers were expected to be some sort of scholars.
It's basic supply and demand.
> Conversely, programing was originally a more female dominated profession and not well paid nor respected.
It was much more menial and repetitive work than today's programming, more comparable to accounting. Also, programming wasn't in present demand back then. Personal computers were not a thing.
Now In India, students starting CS are often told "CS has no longer demand" in recent years.
The problem was too many people entering engineering degrees after a temporary 'IT boom' decades ago, seeing that as a way towards upwards social mobility.
That's one reason I use linux. I am a student and I have this 4GB laptop I brought for less than INR 30,000, and linux is still super responsive on this. Windows lags for 5 seconds before pressing Windows key and search results showing up.
Learn C and it's standard libs (stdio etc..), if you haven't already. Choose a good book for this because many tutorials etc.. you find online are pretty incomplete. Then read one of your books about UNIX APIs.
Also it's worth learning how to use a C debugger (gdb or visual studio one).
* OS
You can look at linux source code but it would be daunting. I'd suggest starting with a Teaching OS and accompanying book, eg xv6 or minix.
Try doing modifications in it. toy OSes generally come with such exercises.
* Assembly language
Learning C doesn't give a perfect idea how machines work. Learn X86_64 assembly programming. you can inspect what assmebly output your C programs give using godbolt's compiler explorer website. Assembly is little boring so don't try to memorize instructions. The mental model is important thing.
* Basics of algorithms and data structures
Maybe you already know, because you worked in back end. But if you're not familiar with few data structures like hash tables, b trees etc.. it might be worth familiarising yourself.
Some miscellaneous topics you might get interested in: linkers / executable formats, OS level stuff related to computer networks, multi threading, file systems, SIMD / vector instructions in assembly.
As others said, write some code when learning. You don't need to do entire projects yourself, you can also play around with established projects.
I don't care. Telling incompetent people to fuck off is cool AF.