Back in the 90s I used to encourage kids to get into software development, but not anymore, but for a different reason than others listed.

I don't encourage folks to get into software development because IMO 'thanks' to the free software crusaders of the 90s, it is easier to make a living today putting up sheet rock than writing software.

If your ultimate career goal is to write software used internally in a corporation (which is an honorable and sometimes exciting career for many), then go for it, but if you want an opportunity to exercise your creativity by creating software solutions to various problems of our world, and be able to make enough money to be able to devote the best hours of your day to this work, then you might be better off buying lottery tickets, because your odds are probably about the same.

While many folks (especially younger folks who don't know any different) might think that getting software for free is a wonderful thing (which it is if you only view the world from the perspective of a consumer) and are big fans of crowd-everything, the other side of the crowd focus is that the only software that gets built is the software that 'the crowd' happens to fall in love with, and in a world where you are expected to give away software or charge a dollar for it, popularity becomes the prime directive, and so you end up with millions of porn sites and 5 folks who get lucky enough to have written the program that happens to become the 'thing' this year, or get bought by Facebook or Yahoo for a billion dollars, while everyone else ends up coding as a hobby or quitting altogether once they have real bills to pay.

In the 90s, I wrote a few shareware programs that I sold just a couple of thousand of for $20 per registered user, and was able to quit my first tech job form them. IMO if it was commonplace for folks to drop $10 or $20 (i.e. a few visits to Starbucks) on software products they liked, then I think that there would be enough incentive for there to be many independent software developers out there putting out a variety of products that would do things a whole lot more useful than to help you share pictures of your cats more easily.