[tastythrowaway]

I... don't think that's true. There's more jobs being created and more and newer technologies, and not every skill is universally applicable. If anything students should be more prepared to learn and apply themselves because there are actually lucrative careers waiting for them (assuming they choose to go into this field). Once the machines start writing their own code and scripting their own automation and plugging in their own power cords... well, then we've got bigger problems

[oflanac52]

How "lucrative" it will be at the end only seems to play a small factor, it's all just too abstract for some people to understand how they can go from Hello World to 100k a year. Out of 2 college classes of pure cs and cs/business students 200 or so students (graduated 2017), I only think 25% (maybe less) went on to actually write build software/web/apps.

Also once machines smart enough to writing their code i'm sure we will have much bigger societal issues then just us programmers. I see that point written/said so much it's the biggest platitude of the decade.

[tastythrowaway]

Isn't that true of anything you don't understand? That is to say it's not always easy to connect a -> b -> c with only a cursory understanding of something. But trivially we can see that technical expertise is valuable - and surprisingly (still) increasingly so at that. Furthermore, knowing how to solve problems will always be valuable. As far as your statistic goes, that's quite a hand-wavy and unsupported assertion. To what population does this generalize? What is the source? And if only 25% are going on to careers as developers, does that not imply that the labor market isn't necessarily growing fast enough to outstrip available need and thus lower salaries?