Essentially, yes!! That was my original advise and I'm sticking to it. If OP doesn't want to work retail (which I don't blame them), that's their only shot at working hospital. (but they should also look into other areas of pharmacy such as PBM, LTC, etc.).
Not to be a jerk, but OP has essentially shot themselves in the foot here. If I remember right, they went to a private school which means they took out 200K+ in loans and now they're considering taking out more loans to do a CS degree? At yet another private school? Yes federal loans can be forgiven after 20 years of on time payments, but I doubt they took out only federal loans and probably have a pretty penny in private loans. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
I don't want to get into more financial detail discussion here. OP didn't intend to, nor did I.
My guess is yes. Honestly CS seems like a field that can very easily be outsourced to other countries for a much cheaper rate. I mean it is all done online. When looking for a career, you should make sure that it's not a career that can be outsourced or automated. Everyone keeps thinking that pharmacy will be automated eventually, but there's laws in place to prevent that. Every single medication order (minus a few exceptions such as ER orders) require a pharmacist (licensed in that specific state) to approve them. Legally that cannot be done by a computer, and pharmacists have too much money to allow that to change. It also can't be outsourced (well it technically could, but the person it is being outsourced to has to be licensed in whatever state they are approving orders in).
In fact, CS already undergone a massive wave of outsourcing back in late 2000s when great recession hit the hardest. IT firms thought they could save a ton of money by sending projects overseas to India or China. Guess what happened? It backfired them badly, and they turned out having to spend even more money to test and rewrite those crappy codes submitted by Indian IT contractors. That's so much worse than hiring someone here and get it done once and for all. The technical skills of US CS grads are just so much superior than oversea IT contractors. I remember last year a consulting firm did a skill assessment and found that even an average CS grad from an average state school is skill-wise vastly superior than most of foreign IT contractors, especially those in China or India.
So programming jobs came back since 2012, and they stayed here ever since. If you follow the tech scene, you will know there was huge progress done in the domain of artificial intelligence. A lot of things previously envisioned only in scifi movies have become the reality. As the trade dispute with China, India, and probably Europe intensifies, we probably won't see another wave of IT outsourcing anytime soon, maybe never again.
If you are thinking using law as the last defense for pharmacy job security, I think you are still living and thinking in the past. Take NYC Taxi medallion as an example, taxi drivers in NYC used medallion to exclusively drive out competition and secure their jobs for decades. In fact, medallions used to be called "the best investment in America". Guess what happened after Uber and Lyft came online? Medallion devalued so much, and taxi drivers were terribly out-competed by Uber and Lyft drivers in terms of price and service.
Pharmaceuticals are already on the very top of the target list for the 1st tier IT giants. As far as I know, Apple is teaming up with Epic systems to get into the mobile EHR business. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple acquires Epic eventually and dominates the personal medical records business. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is now also a pharmaceutical company, with Verily Life Sciences (with the very intention of eventually automating clinical decisions) and Calico under their banner. Google is also currently beta-testing its cloud healthcare analytics API. Amazon now literally owns whole foods, and they acquired PillPack back in mid-2018 and directly competes with CVS and Walgreen's, in the retail sector.
Remember, laws can be overturned by politicians at any time, and 1st tier IT giants now have multi-trillion dollar valuation, and if they want, I don't think some stupid dumb laws requiring pharmacist to oversee medication dispensing will prevent them getting into the business. In reality, pharmacists never really guaranteed much patient medication safety any way, as the recent New York Times article has put it under the spotlight. If you only rely on some administrative laws to protect your job, I would say your job is probably already on the chopping block.
