I mean, you can totally do fine as a straight CS major, and there are plenty of CS/math majors who can report successful, productive, profitable careers as a pr

I mean, you can totally do fine as a straight CS major, and there are plenty of CS/math majors who can report successful, productive, profitable careers as a programmer in this very thread. But there's a lot of programming to do where domain knowledge is absolute essential, and if it turns out you find one of those areas interesting, college is a great time to acquire that domain knowledge, in parallel with getting your certificate stamped that says you're safe to employ as a programmer. Biology, chemistry, linguistics, cognitive science, every flavor of engineering. All of it comes with programming work to do. Protein folding, genetics, natural language processing, computer vision, CAD software, control software... Being able to program is a useful skill, but you have to know what to program. And yes, there are plenty of companies who will happily hire a programmer to write SQL queries and copy fields from one protocol buffer to another. But those options don't go away because you also have a thorough understanding of, say, chemical engineering; you just also have another career path open to you where you can do a boatload of programming, just not with web frameworks.