...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any part

...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing That was true 35 years ago, and without the metric butt-ton of money being paid now (though programming has always paid well within my lifetime). I've worked with those folks. The reason you might not see it is because they either left the field they hated, or worse, they stuck around long enough to become managers of what they don't understand. it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was. Mmm, I don't know that it ever "was". Ignore the Carmacks, Wozniaks, et. al., of the world and you'll find that most folks holding programming jobs had the standard four year degree (because you were unlikely to get hired in 1985 without one), working on internal LOB apps.