I'm a history/philosophy major who ended up as a programmer. Pure speculation but I wonder if another part is that history helps you think hard about groups of people and how to lead them / how they work together. I think it also conveys things that traditional management theory might not (I haven't studied it so I can't say for sure), but things like uncertainty and the contingency of events come through in a big way.

My advice for any younger people reading this is to do something practical and something for passion. I regret not getting a technical education that would have had much better employment prospects and having to claw my way through the back door, but I also wouldn't trade away my humanities education for anything.

EDIT: FWIW I did not go to an elite university and make a good living as an engineering manager. I also talked on a plane once to a guy who said the best people he met in IT were NSA cryptographers, but the second best were people like me. His theory was that people who studied humanities and then went on to do technical work must have had a passion for it since they had to work extra hard to get into the field. Maybe that's a big part of it, maybe studying history has nothing to do with it and they just went into other high paying fields.

I suspect most people who go into a history major out of high school come from a background which informed them that it's something they can do, and still be okay.

Many kids couldn't go into history simply because their parents would be vehemently against it.

Among history majors, we can probably find a good many individuals whose parents supported them in their choice, and a good bulk of that support likely has economic roots.

I would imagine a good chunk of history majors go on to get their law degree or MBA, which would also make this analysis not conclusive.