I frequently had papers rejected as "not new" without citation and then accepted elsewhere where they told me on request that they checked carefully and found the content was indeed new and interesting
When I've had this kind of rejection, it typically means that the paper is not well presented. Part of the reason that papers that are rejected one or more times before publication tend to be more widely cited is that the rejection and editing phase forces you to make your arguments in a clearer and more structured manner.
If you have a new or interesting approach forget about getting grant funding, you only get money in the UK if the work has already been proven to be successful
While that's more or less true, it's worth noting that EPSRC doesn't require any accountability on the spent funds, they just use previous research output when judging the next application. That means that if you want to do something groundbreaking then you can apply for a grant to do something a bit incremental (ideally something that you've mostly done but not published), then use the money to do the groundbreaking thing. Then, when you apply for the next grant, the groundbreaking things that you want to do are easier to fund.
Citations are a terrible way of measuring paper quality. One of the most recent citations of a paper of mine was from some guys I know at MIT, who basically said 'and this is exactly the wrong way of doing it'. A lot of the things we cite with the biggest citation counts are benchmark suites. There's a reason that the REF[1] explicitly didn't include bibliometrics when evaluating impact (at least in computer science, not sure about other fields).
[1] The 'Research Excellence Framework', which assesses and ranks the research output of UK university departments.
It is hard. Producing a new creative work, be it a film, piece of software, book, or whatever, is hard and often expensive. Copying a creative work is cheap to the point that it's barely worth measuring the cost. Lots of influential companies have business models that revolve around doing the difficult thing for free and then charging for the easy thing to make up for it. They're eventually going to be displaced by companies that realise that it makes more sense to charge for the difficult thing - we're seeing this in software already, with open source companies giving away code that's already written for free and charging for writing new features or customisation (or, in some cases, entirely new programs).
In 100 years, people are going to look back on DRM and restrictive copyright in much the same way that we look back at the laws that required motor cars to have someone walk in front of them with a red flag. Regulations that can't possibly work in the long term, designed to prop up an industry that's suddenly found itself obsoleted by new technology.
This stuff isn't hard. You know at every call site what the possible exceptions are, and you know this because the compiler won't let you explicitly throw or fail to handle any exceptions in your methods. The exceptions that a method can throw are in the JavaDoc and are checked at compile time, so you'll get a compile error if you don't either handle or advertise the exception.
Good error handling is one of the key things that differentiates good developers from bad. If it's something that you find hard, in a language that goes out of its way to make it easy, then you might want to consider other careers.
Most of the developing world just doesn't have this problem.
Actually that's not true. India and China did very well out of being a cheap place to manufacture things because of the low labour cost. Now, factories that are almost entirely automated are replacing those staffed by unskilled workers. This means that no one is building them in developing countries and creating jobs there. The only reason that companies like Foxconn have for picking places in Africa for manufacturing now is the the lack of environmental regulation: a few politicians get paid off, but the local economy doesn't benefit and the local environment gets polluted. The path Japan took, of cheaply copying things, being a cheap place to build factories, developing local skills, and then competing internationally with original products, doesn't exist anymore.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.