I think about this clip from Michael Seibel a lot, where he made an interesting observation when he went to a class of students interested in tech:

When he asked, “how many of you are studying CS and write code?“, 90% of them raised their hands.

When he asked, “what percentage of you want to be writing code as part of a startup or job”, 90% of them lowered their hands.

While humorous, it seems to also be an extremely accurate commentary of the typical CS majors of many of the schools I’ve visited (Yale, Harvard, and even Stanford). Many students in computer science programs are not necessarily interested in coding. Instead, they often aspire to become “product managers” or some other role that is nontechnical.

One of the reasons I’ve heard a lot about is “I don’t want to waste the liberal arts education,” which seems to suggest that coding or building products are beneath them. Honestly, I can see their perspective. Especially if you weren’t technical in high school and are just learning computer science during your time in college, it may seem weird to be doing “grunt work,” or that you should naturally be a leader and coding doesn’t seem to be .