I guess I crossed that milestone too, without thinking much about it. My brother was in college, taking CS classes, and then my high school offered a course in BASIC so I signed up, in 1981. Meanwhile, my mom had started taking night classes in programming at a community college, and ended up being asked to teach the introductory course. We were in the Detroit area, and the car companies were using PL/1, so that was what the colleges taught, until everybody switched to Pascal. My mom's students were getting decent jobs after 1 year in her course. She bought a couple of computers out of her own pocket and started a zeroth hour programming class at the high school where she was a science teacher.

There were lots of family debates about programming. My mom thought that the job market for programmers would soon be flooded, and that in any event, it was too easy to justify 4 years of college study. I was interested in a variety of things and ended up majoring in math and physics. I got a summer internship at a computing facility, and formed the impression that an actual programming job would ultimately be boring. But programming, in the service of physics and electronics, was exciting! At my college, the professors who embraced personal computers and were doing cool things with them, were in the math and science departments.

Of course that's all hindsight, but interesting to see how my opinions have held up over the years. I think programming turned out to be harder than imagined, for people to learn, and we don't know precisely why. Views about how programming requires this or that kind of thinking, don't seem to hold water. Yet there's a shortage of programmers relative to investor interest in software development.

Is it boring? Was I right about that? I watch the programmers at my workplace doing their jobs, but at the same time, maybe they think my job is boring. That's a matter of personal preference, and all jobs have some amount of drudge work.

I'm still interested in programming, but on my own terms. I'm one of those dreaded "scientific" programmers, who uses programming as a problem solving tool, rather than for creating software for widespread use.