[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?