[evouga]

I graduated ‘07. Computer science was seen as a reasonable, but sub-optimal, career path in terms of money and job opportunities. If you were optimizing for career you did pre-med. The CS classes were small (30 students) and consisted of people who were passionate about the field irrespective of making less money than doctors or other engineers.

Today the same school has huge classes (300 students) and many don’t have much talent or passion for the subject, but have been told that “people who want good jobs do CS.” It’s true new pre-med, in other words.

[aeonik]

I graduated from highschool at this time and I checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to help pick my degree. Computer disciplines and health disciplines dominated the top 10 most projected growth and top salaries at the time.

If I recall correctly, "Computer Systems Analyst" was one on the top of the computer-related jobs.

[effingwewt]

CSA was a high paying well respected job as I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.When I graduated and for a few years after it was still at the top, though software jobs had been moving away from CSAs, so you ended up with a bunch of people who couldn't get decent paying jobs in the field.

Back then the meme was L2Web Design.

It quickly overtook CSA and became the hot new fad, but the bubble burst fairly quickly, and now again you have people out of work and all competing for the same few jobs.

I watched so mamy web designers, real estate agents etc scramble to find some kind of work they could do that would pay close to what they'd been making.

In the end, most made career changes.

Here we are again and it's worse. Companies infantilzed their workforce, got them to expect pay of probably 10x what they are actually worth, and now they may have to join the 'real' workforce and get an actual job.

The movie Fun With Dick and Jane explores this very well even though it's technically a comedy, it holds so much truth its scary.