[simonh]

I think the important thing is that people enjoy it. They may enjoy other things too, maybe more, and have other responsibilities and that's fine. One of my kids is obsessed with cars, she's a proper petrol head, but she's going into software engineering. I told her that's fine as long as you genuinely enjoy programming, cars can be a great hobby. Life doesn't have to be about one thing.

Anyway in IT there are loads of different jobs other than programming. There's QA, application support, databases, project management, team leads, all sorts and it's pretty easy to switch tracks once you're on the inside.