Computer Science is the 5th highest paying undergrad degree right now.
Also, my friend has a math and econ degree, never programmed, got a new job at a trading firm, guess what the first thing they want him to do is: learn C++.
Even if the industry goes in the shitter I guarantee programmers will be better off than 90% of the economy.
It's because the people that are good with math, finance, and programming don't want to use C++ (or live in Atlanta). Remove the C++, and it becomes much easier to find people. Look at how successful companies like Jane Street Capital are in recruiting, for example, even though the pool of people that know OCaml is much smaller than the pool of people that know C++.
(My experience with people that know math and finance is that they do all their work in Excel. That's because simple programs become 100-file boilerplate monsters in C++ and Java, and someone told them that Perl and Python are not real programming languages. Sigh.
OTOH, turning spreadsheets into production software is profitable and enjoyable. Let the programmers program and let the finance people do finance.)
Also, my friend has a math and econ degree, never programmed, got a new job at a trading firm, guess what the first thing they want him to do is: learn C++.
Even if the industry goes in the shitter I guarantee programmers will be better off than 90% of the economy.