Arguably both Gates and Zuckerberg got rich by starting a company -- there are plenty of Microsoft and Facebook programmers that didn't get rich, and plenty of

Arguably both Gates and Zuckerberg got rich by starting a company -- there are plenty of Microsoft and Facebook programmers that didn't get rich, and plenty of CEOs of tech companies that earned money without writing a single line of code. I'm somewhat dubious that learning to program is what makes people successful at starting innovative business the way Gates and Zuckerberg did. > Yeah you could be a writer and write a novel people love, or a painter, etc. But none of these things pay particularly well. For a few it does; Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, E.L. James -- they're all millionaires. Not quite billionaires like Gates or Zuckerberg, but rich nonetheless. By comparison, the vast majority of writers aren't rich, but neither are the vast majority of programmers. Yea, "you could get rich by coding", but learning to code in order to get rich is about as sound of a strategy as playing the lottery.