While the media paints the camps as "get a great paying job", I see more people wanting a more meaningful life. They've got an expensive degree in English or something similarly un-useful and want to work on things that matter. They see coding as the path to get there.
I studied both CS and English in college, and got my degree in English. The communication skills and translation techniques I learned as an English major have been tremendously useful to me in my career as a software engineer. In my experience hiring developers, I've found that those with liberal arts degrees do very well, particularly when they leverage their humanities background as an asset.
Anyone can write code, but it takes a breadth of knowledge and perspective to effectively maintain and engineer software that has societal value.
What would it have been like if you had not studied CS, and graduated with just an English degree? Well, we have a fairly good idea: just look at pure English degree holders and how they are faring in today's economy. Most of them are underemployed and overworked as they work multiple jobs in the service sector to make ends meet.
You, on the other hand, were able to use what you learned in your English program to boost your effectiveness in software engineering. But make no mistake: software engineering is the real, solid foundation of your career. Not English. English was useful, but only in combination with your technical knowledge.
The problem is that the skills from an English degree itself aren't in high demand by employers.
You've conflated the terms "meaningful" and "useful". These are not equivalent terms. Meaning is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. Use is an observable action.
If I help make a product that gets 16% more people to click on ads for something they didn't need in the first place, I will have been _useful_ to the advertiser (and my own pocket). But to say that gives my life _meaning_ merely displays a twenty-first-century version of the lazy and ignorant naivete that the Humanities have tried to fight against all along.
I am not against having a better paying job, nor am I saying folks can't find meaning in software development (or any field, for that matter). And I'm not implying that an English degree should make you a bunch of money. It's just that this whole "learn to do some JavaScript and CSS, change the world!" technohype is just plain bullshit.
Do you need to pay $100k to learn the skills to see through such bullshit? No. But the sort of things that the Humanities teach are exactly the prophylactic that one needs to guard against such existential wheel-spinning.
I'm pretty close to the guy you're talking about (though I'm 5 years down the line from quitting my English PhD program, and have already figured out how work freelance without starving).
I'm not sure I agree that more users === "work that matters", though I can agree it is much more difficult to find reasonable work the relies on a BA in Philosophy than to find reasonably good paying work that relies on being able to slap together some PHP script.
But I generally agree with you: the issue that the people I work with are all dealing with is figuring out how to not work 50 hours a week and still make a living, and being a tradesman programmer is a very easy way to do that (I'm finding it comparable to being an electrician or plumber without having to actually leave the house and own a truck full of tools).
This fall I had tried to get some interest among the people out here in Fredericksburg for a class, but I couldn't get enough people to sign on so I put my plans on hold. Teaching folks to do this kind of work is a good thing, so I wish you great success on codeup.
Many are stuck in what they consider dead-end careers like retail or customer service. They feel like cogs in a machine.