I, too, have had a pretty successful and rewarding career in software with a liberal arts degree -- but I'm also 50, so when I entered the workforce in the earl

I, too, have had a pretty successful and rewarding career in software with a liberal arts degree -- but I'm also 50, so when I entered the workforce in the early 1990s, lots of (at least American) university programs were still super behind what was actually in use in the commercial world. Many of my coworkers over the years had only 2-year degrees, or in a couple of exceptional cases no degree at all. People my age mostly learned to program on our own, as teenagers, starting with BASIC and then going deeper, so by the time we were in a position to take CS 101 or whatever we balked, because spending time listening to a professor tell you about writing a bubble sort in FORTRAN just isn't interesting or applicable when your hobby project is writing your own text editor or whatever. So yeah, lots of people my age have liberal arts degrees -- political science, English, foreign languages, history, whatever. The secret advantage of that background is that we can usually write and communicate WAY better than the CS grads, which turns out to be immensely useful. The tl;dr is really "understanding how software gets built AND being able to describe it to both technical and nontechnical people opens up lucrative career paths."