I'm exactly the same age as you.

You may very well be right about how people make career decisions. What you've described sounds closer to how this actually happens. Very few people sit down with a spreadsheet, estimating salaries, working conditions, job security, likelihood of various outcomes, factor in their own risk tolerance, and take whatever comes out as the decision. Many people don't even engage in a similar but less mechanical version of this. So yes, in that sense, I agree.

I do think you may be underestimating the extent to which the traditions you describe may be a distillation of what I described above, though, almost a kind of heuristic. A kids sees that his uncle is a member of profession X, lives in a nice house, enjoys his work, realizes it's a good match with his own personality, and is drawn to it. Parents are aware that certain fields are a path to the middle (perhaps upper) middle classes and nudge their own kids toward them (or rule with an iron fist and practically force them to).

This is why, as I said above, I am open to the concept of a shortage, that I don't dismiss it outright the way some economists do (where a shortage simply indicates disconnect between supply and demand - as with all things, supply rises and demand diminishes at higher salary/price levels until the market reaches equilibrium).

I do see human choices, including career choices, as more personal and cultural - I wouldn't call them irrational, which implies a notable lack of reason, but they are not the result of cut and dried reasoning. I am open to the possibility that these cultural and personal decision can leave young people - especially in situations where new valid professions have arrived within the span of a half generation - unaware of or uninterested in things that are actually very, very good options.

But like I said, I'm only open to this, I'm not willing to conclude that this is what is happening without looking at the data for a particular field. People may be overlooking a field that would be a very rational and wise career choice - or, alternatively, they may be rationally and wisely avoiding a field because far better options for people with their skill and academic mindset exist elsewhere.

My conclusion is that while it isn't wildly irrational to go into software development, the overall pay, working conditions, and job security ultimately do fall short of the kind of options available to people who are capable of going into it. We are a field where 44 year olds like us often (but by no means always) work in open offices with back visibility, experience issues with age discrimination, work in (corrupted) "agile" or "scrum" teams that prevent long term thinking or meaningful autonomy, and at the median in SF (ground zero for the "shortage") earn only roughly the same salary as a dental hygienist, and considerably less than a registered nurse. Sometimes our work is important, but often we are just migrating data from peoplesoft to oracle and back again, (marching UP and DOWN the squaaaaare![1]), or making the thingy look like the other thingy and work with this other thingy (please estimate the time it will take for our schedule tracking software and update your progress!). This may seem like an unfair characterization, and I would certainly agree that there are far more interesting jobs in software development out there, but some of the loudest voices insisting that there is a shortage of developers clearly are just looking for ways to pay people less to march up and down the square.

Every time I say this, it is important to me to point out that I have absolutely no objection whatsoever to nurses earning good salaries, or earning more at the median than software developers in San Francisco. They do an important and hard job, and I absolutely believe they earn those salaries. What I won't do is act like there's some mysterious cultural factor in why young people are not going into software development in the numbers that silicon valley employers would like them to.

This isn't about making it cool, or simply helping people realize the opportunities that are out there. There's some pretty deep structural change that needs to happen before people with choice in the US will consider software development a better option than the other paths available to free and full citizens who have the right to pick their own educational and career path in a labor market.

[1] monty python reference