Smart people have been doing good work for the wrong reasons for decades. Really, for a lot longer than that. There's nothing new there. The quality of life yo

Smart people have been doing good work for the wrong reasons for decades. Really, for a lot longer than that. There's nothing new there. The quality of life you have as a junior programmer depends hugely, hugely, on the company you work for. So does the amount of money you are likely to pull in. The two are not necessarily inversely proportional. Interview wisely. Fresh graduates typically have a disadvantage in having little concept of what it takes to get things out the door in a supportable manner, and they will heroically throw themselves into projects they have hilariously underestimated. If you end up working unsustainable hours, there's a good chance you backed yourself into it. Find people and places that can help you avoid those traps early on. CS as it is taught bears little resemblance to most of the technical work done in Silicon Valley. It also probably has little resemblance to the passion projects you did as a kid. It is not necessary to be a CS major to become a software engineer, no matter what the recruiters think. But, for the most part, it doesn't hurt, and you probably start out with a broader foundation than a non-CS major typically will. As a programmer, your job is to reify thought-stuff. This gives you an extraordinary flexibility to push your career in a direction you want. Heck, you might find yourself practically switching careers every few years, or you might decide to stick in one area and specialize. Either way, there's plenty of places to turn in CS if you wish to avoid following the herd. You will hear folks wring their hands about whether their jobs might be automated away in a few years, or whether the economy will hold, or whether the demand for CS jobs is really a myth perpetrated by FAANG to pay below-market wages to suckers, etc. etc. etc. The world has a thousand ways to make you question your worth, and you will probably hear most of them at one point or another. When I entered the industry a little book had recently come out called "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer." It predicted that "the American programmer is about to share the fate of the dodo bird." Yet here we are, decades on, just as likely to bang through projects like bucking broncos as ever, but managing to turn out some fine work along the way. Don't believe everything you read.