>> Wonder what this guy would say to the countless millions who toil away in factories, big box retail, and accounting offices. None of these people do this for the love of the job. They do it because it needs to be done and they get paid for it.

There's always someone doing worse than you do. I'm a programmer now but in a previous life I fed conveyor belts. I did menial jobs most of my life until I migrated and graduated (and, yep, got a student loan to repay). I thought I had it bad, but I once saw a video of a boy diving into a midden with a stick to unclog it. No joke- he dove into a big hole in the ground filled with shit. He had a rope tied round his waist and a stick.

So what do you say to that boy? "Stay where you are because think of all those countless minions who don't even have a stick"?

No, people will always want to do better. We'll always want our every working hour to be productive and fullfilling. And as well we should. We should strive to achieve that.

So, speaking as one of those countless minions, I'm glad that I could escape the Hell of One-Thousand Soul-Crushingly Meaningless Tasks, and I don't wish anyone to use my sojourn there to keep anyone in their place.

I like your post and think it's valid, but I would say that coding in high school/college doesn't prepare you for the real world at all.

In high school I was hacking on silly personal projects. In college I was solving cool algorithms, puzzles, and games. But in the real world most programming roles are pretty menial / not a super exciting domain / consist largely of process, code reviews, QA, debugging.

My friend has a HR degree where she got to study psychology and organizational principles and how to motivate people and run a business, and now she does paperwork all day managing employee sick time and vacation time and making sure all their certifications are up to date. I'd be surprised if any degree fully prepares students for just how much menial work they'll be doing, partly because those bits don't require a university course to learn.

Some of those people make just as much money as I do once you factor in the fact that they don't pay a huge chunk of it to student loans.

Step-father-in-law is a truck driver, makes only slightly less than money than me.

But that's the thing, though- the hypesters promises one thing, and the industry delivers another. "Everyone should code." "Software is eating the world." All of this is true, but despite the magic of engineering, which gives you the biggest lever in the world to move the most weight, actual coding jobs are swamped in mundanity. If people going in knew that it was more Office Space than The Social Network, it'd be less of a disillusionment.