Should Young People Learn Computer Science?

Cory House tweet: "If your child was 18, would you recommend they pursue a career in programming today?" No one said yes.

This tweet made me think, and it’s not the only one I’ve seen recently. There are people struggling to find a job in software development. Thousands are laid off every quarter. Large areas of our profession are getting automated. So why should a young student choose this career?

Should we encourage young people to learn Computer Science and programming?

Well in my very biased opinion it’s one of the best professions ever. You are creating things out of thin air by just imagining them with the right level of precision. One programmer or a small team can create a whole big business or a tool that billions use daily. Since I got my first PC I haven’t seriously considered any other career.

You could argue that yes, the past 30 years were great, but the current market is strongly hinting that much fewer programmers are needed, if any. Certainly it was a great industry for millennials like myself, but maybe gen z will see it decline? This is an argument that sounds compelling based on the job market in the past few years.

But I would reply that the tough job market is a temporary correction driven by megalomaniac hiring policies in 2020-21 more than any serious return from investment into automation. In 2026 the world needs more software then before. Code is still the main means of automation in most industries, and will remain that in the foreseeable future. Yes, coding agents write bigger and bigger portions of that code now, but that just means that we are moving up one more layer of abstraction.

My first programming language was Assembly, which is almost as close to the metal as you can get, but very few people write it anymore, because it was abstracted away by higher level languages. We are seeing the same shift now when English seems to be the hottest programming language.

But the thing is, it was never about the language. It was about design tradeoffs, technical constraints, understanding the underlying system. These skills are still as necessary as ever and they are not getting easier any time soon. Ironically, as LLMs simplify development for a specific type of software projects, we need to invent new architecture principles for software that uses LLMs in turn. And for that, we need people because coding agents are still not great in coming up with novel solutions to higher level design problems. Good Computer Science programs teach students the foundations of computing, not just the recent trends in SaaS development. They teach problem solving, collaboration, how to do research. We need that now no less than during the previous 500 years since science began.

And definitely, absolutely we need young people entering the industry every year. Not only they bring new energy and new ideas, but they will gain experience and become the owners and maintainers of the software we are depending on today.

So what do you think? If you had an 18 year old child today, would you recommend a career in software?