I *have* told young kids to stay away from technology jobs in the 21st century, including my 2 recent college graduated children. I tell them to do what you like, and if you happen to enjoy creating custom mods in your video games, then you might like software development. But the business expectations in this day and age are INSANE. Long gone are the days when you could tell Finance that their new report will be available in 6-10 weeks. Today they want it in 6-10 hours (isn't that why we let you build the Data Warehouse?!).

Time after time IT projects stumble and fail because they were hurried, often needlessly, and the business continues to be shocked, shocked I tell you, that IT did not pull a rabbit out of a hat. Kids, enjoy the technology sausage, but don't get involved in making it if you can avoid it. The pride and fun in software/database development does not exist these days.