>Being a programmer makes you more money more quickly than any of those professions and has a higher ceiling to boot. How many billionaire lawyers and doctors a

>Being a programmer makes you more money more quickly than any of those professions and has a higher ceiling to boot. How many billionaire lawyers and doctors are there? How many businesspeople, financiers, lawyers, or doctors make six figures at 22 years old? I agree on the first part. If you are optimizing for cash at 22, you are best off as a programmer. However, by the time you are 30? your doctor and lawyer friends are making 3x what you are. As for your ceiling argument, you are simply wrong. There are some programmers who made the jump to business person who have done very well but those people made their billions doing business, not programming. You can make a strong argument that if you want to be a business person today, you should first get training as an Engineer; many of the most ambitious MBAs I have met had an Engineering undergrad. That's valid, but they are still business people more than programmers. If you actually just want to be a programmer, you have to be world-class to make a quarter-million a year. I mean, I know some guys who do it... but they are absolutely incredible in ways that most of us simply couldn't be. For the rest of us, "six figures" means "we're going to peak around $150K/yr" - and that's only if we live in a place with incredibly high rent. Realistically, Doctors and Lawyers cap out much higher than Programmers. >Not only that, it's also less risky! How many programmers are $250k in debt at 25 years old without having worked a day in their lives in their chosen professions? How many doctors? How many lawyers? Eh, there are plenty of people who wash out of computer science programs. That's true of both doctors and lawyers; you do have a point that because doctor and lawyer training takes longer, you have the risk that if you wash out later in the process, you will have wasted a lot more money.