Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)

Agreed so many professions have to keep a bit up to date but 90% of the stuff they need to know is learned on the job or in college a long time ago. In Software I feel like the things I was working on 10 year ago are completely different to what I do now, which is why 50yo devs are competing with 25yo for the same jobs (assuming you dont want to be a manager)

I am not denying anything you're saying, I also know many older programmers who have no issues with their career.

My comment is about the perception of older programmers and why this may affect enrollment in Computer Science.

I agree with your analysis, but this is not the perception that the general population holds.

I'll give my personal take as a ex-CS major who dropped out to major in something else (math), tried to escape a career in software development, and ultimately wound up back in it when I saw how much more work and stress the other alternatives were (for me at least).

- Computer science to me sounded way more fun than it actually was. I loved building things and programming, but that's not what CS is. CS is theory. I was bored to tears learning about sorting algorithms and binary search trees.

Same applies to machine learning and AI. The reality of studying it was way less fun than the idea. Even my AI professor acknowledged that.

- As someone who'd always taught myself programming on my own, I didn't see the point in dedicating my 4 years of study to something I felt like I could teach myself. Since there was a good chance I'd probably end up working as a software engineer anyways, I thought it'd be smarter to study something I probably wouldn't otherwise ever teach myself on my own.

- This is rude and shallow, but I didn't like my CS classmates. There was such a disproportionately high amount of weirdos, and I didn't want to be surrounded with those people all day and god forbid become one of them. I vividly remember studying in the CS lounge and having to stop myself from face-palming. If I was a sociable kid it probably wouldn't matter, but as a socially awkward kid it would be too easy to only be surrounded like similar people the rest of my life and never evolve.

- Software engineering seemed boring, just being stuck in a cubicle all day. I did an internship as a programmer, and although it was relatively easy, moderately interesting, and stress-fee, I was terrified of the thought of spending the rest of my life in that cubicle.

- I wanted more money and status. At the time (almost 10 years ago), it seemed that finance was the highest paying and most prestigious field to go into. Finance sounded more exciting, and I liked the idea of their being no ceiling on compensation, whereas software engineering seemed capped at $200k/yr. Of course now things have changed, and tech comp at big corporations tops out at more like $500k/yr (or more if you get equity and win the startup lotto), and tech is way more respected than before. High finance still pays the most, but those jobs are basically limited to Ivy League graduates, the hours are insane, authoritarian work cultures, no remote work, and IMO the work is extremely boring and utterly meaningless, even moreso than software engineering where at least you're actually creating something.

Of course my views nearly a decade since graduating have evolved. I gave in and took on a career in software engineering, which I've attempted to leave at times but always ended up returning (though once I'm financially independent you better believe I'll be gone for good). But at least at the time those were some reasons why I dropped my CS major despite being convinced since high school that that was my calling.

I sympathize with this problem, but characterizing it as unique to CS is myopic IMO. Far from every "mature profession" is 9-5 in an office.

Well, it isn't always. As in the latest big mystery I was a part of solving -- the build failed because there were files left over after the "clean" step of msbuild. This obviously shouldn't happen.

The culprit was an extra build action (among ~20) that had been cut-and-pasted from Stack Overflow 1.5 years ago and worked splendidly, until an unrelated update (dev machine prerequisite, installed organization-wide) caused it to behave differently on local builds but not on the build servers. The check-in comment of the commit in question was "merge hmm", and the start time of the failure is uncertain because the project was rarely built outside of the centralized build infrastructure (where it worked fine). 10 cumulative hours of debugging across four developers was spent to figure this out.

In my experience, these kinds of "WTF" errors happen more often than the ones that make you go "wow, I am stupid". At least when you reach a skill level where the obvious problems don't show up so often.

But the point stands that this requires an uncommon kind of patience. Hooray, we solved it. Now we are finally able to modify the back-end behavior of this specific type of mutual fund order, which is what we wanted in the first place. Think the finance part of the task is more interesting than the banging your head against the wall debugging the tech stack part? Tough luck! Should have been born at the time when this happened by manually operating a terminal in the back office.