[enasterosophes]

Computer science opens the door to a wide range of work. The lower end of that range is indeed insecure and doesn't pay very well. However, get into the right industry, and you can match a lawyer for income -- without all the hastle and hurdles that junior lawyers have to go through. We're talking easily the upper 4% of income as a junior, eventually going up to 2% or 1% as you gain seniority.

The reason is, there are some skills which are highly in demand, and few people are strong in those skills. In particular, I am thinking of HPC engineering and cloud computing infrastructure engineering. Companies and institutions own large server fleets, we're talking hundreds or thousands of servers. They want whatever is running on those fleets to have high performance, security, and zero downtime.

This kind of work requires strong Linux systems administration and programming skills, an understanding of enterprise networking and storage technologies, confidence with at least one orchestration stack such as OpenStack or Kubernetes, and strong CI/CD and IaC skills (look up GitOps.) As a junior, you don't need to tick all these boxes, but people should be able to see that you're able to learn whatever you're missing.

These skills don't usually come directly from a computer science degree. However, a computer science degree is the primary way to get your foot in the door with building those skills. If you want a junior job in cloud computing and are cold-calling because you don't know anyone yet, then it will help if you have good marks in a computer science degree (although it's possible to prove your chops in other ways, like having a history of strong contributions to open source.)

Later, after you build some experience, and you prove that you can keep learning, you get the job done, and you can get along with people, you'll eventually have recruiters chasing after you, and companies willing to listen to whatever income you pitch to them.

[__turbobrew__]

Second on Cloud Infra and SRE stuff. All the big players need it and you have a lever which can move the moon. If you are good at what you do you will have a massive impact on the company. You hear lots of stories like “I saved my company XXX million dollars per year by turning off versioned objects in S3”. I think the hardest part I have had is there is a lot of tacit knowledge in infrastructure, usually you are not the first person to solve a particular problem and anyone who has good industry experience can tell you immediately what you should do. For example I was looking at distributed storage and for kubernetes and was testing out OpenEBS, I spent about 2 months setting it up and getting it working only to find it had some critical shortfalls. Later I was talking with another person from industry and they are like “yea you should just use rook/ceph, everyone uses it”. And lo and behold rook solves my problems and works great.

[dmoy]

> match a lawyer for income

The low end of lawyers is also way, way lower. Law in the US has a massively bimodal income distribution, way more pronounced than Tech with Finance / Big tech paying more. In law your new grads at big firms may pull $200k or whatever, but the median for the rest is like $50k.

It's pretty brutal if you're not top xy% of your class.