> this was never either the general public sentiment

Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.

Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.

Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers.

The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else.

Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.

Yup. I went off to college right after this and was from a poorer family and that's one reason I opted not to go into CS as a degree despite over a decade of programming/web experience. It wasn't seen as a stable career path and the tech sector had a reputation as a bubble hype machine.

The hilarity is that I went into Linguistics instead, and it turns out that in 2023 that is actually very helpful... I'm not the only one either.

I was being told that in 2005/2006. Lucky for me I didn't care.. I just wanted to study something to do with computers rather than biology or physics.