OK. I think Jeff narrowly misses an opportunity here to kick off some badly needed navel gazing in the software development community -- some perspective that w

OK. I think Jeff narrowly misses an opportunity here to kick off some badly needed navel gazing in the software development community -- some perspective that would really help the people that are unsure about their future in software development. Let's say there are roughly two classes of software development: there's development for development's sake, and there's programming to get things done. The first class is where software libraries are written and big applications and architectures are developed. It's the one that really requires passion and big heaping piles of experience, so that you can judge the right way to solve particular problems (and anticipate other problems). This class lives in abstraction. If someone has never written a single line of code before college, I wouldn't encourage them to shoot for this class. The second class is this huge under-served market that the leaders of the software development community seem to rarely acknowledge. I'm sometimes not even sure they know it exists. It's the market where programming is merely a skill that someone brings to their job. It's the market where retail stores could have managers that can cobble together a script to help them iron out scheduling conflicts; where experimental scientists and engineers collect data and then write single-purpose applications to do useful stuff with the data; where even office receptionists can tweak a spreadsheet here and there to make some aspect of the job a little easier. People that have some primary skill set and have programming as a skill are really valuable in almost any environment. I've had a lot of different jobs, from government to really big corporations to really tiny mom-and-pops and just about everything in-between. Every single place I've worked could have benefited from someone there with a little bit of free time and some programming expertise. If you get part way through a computer science major and decide you don't enjoy it, that's totally OK. Go and find the thing that you really do love, and go do that thing, and bring your programming education with you. You don't have to be a good programmer there, you just have to be able to understand another industry well enough to see where it can benefit from having a few things automated here and there.