it does matter whether you've coded or not. then you would understand what I mean by menial work, and I bet people such as
@Drdusk would agree. However, menial was perhaps not the right way to say it. Perhaps, tedious is a better way to say it. When working for coding efficiency, you copy and paste from github, use stackoverflow to get questions answered, and then spend your entire damn life fixing bugs.
The people who are actually developing NEW & important stuff, like the automation that you were going on about, constitute a small amount of the people, and frankly at that point, a lot of people are incredibly and perhaps unnaturally smart. They are not close to your average comp sci student.
this is fair, it seems like you have somewhat of a gauge on computer science salaries. I thought you meant high as in 6 figures out of uni, which only applies to google, amazon, atlassian etc.
However, I would not say 150k a long time into your career is so-called "high". Comp sci in Australia is around a rate of 150k for project managers/team leaders unlike the US which caps at a far higher salary. Please don't bring up startups and stock options, I stated "salary". In comparison to quite a few industries, comp sci indeed pays well, but likely has a lower cap than other industries, since Sydney is somewhat underdeveloped as a comp sci region, especially in the more high-tech stuff. The biggest advantage of comp sci as a degree is the ease of job-finding compared to other fields, which you did state, and perhaps thought I was disregarding. However, what you will find, is that the comp sci market in Sydney is in an undersupply of senior dev's and a somewhat oversupply of junior dev's.
Also note that I said a lot of people end up in admin jobs, not the majority. This was to bring up the fact that a lot of people may not be involved in the "exciting" stuff.
My overall point was meant to allude to computer science being slightly glorified with all the automation and AI craze. The majority of this technology is not developed in Australia, and instead most comp sci majors will end up in less exciting roles, albeit using more brainpower than most other industries. Chances of being involved in truly difficult and new projects will depend on the intelligence of an individual a lot of the time, and frankly, in an industry as stacked in brainpower as computer science, it may be hard to stand out. Long-term trajectory wise, there are also quite a few careers in Australia that pay higher than computer science.
However, if you are looking for high employment rates, computer science is a very good option.
Note that I did see that you wrote skilled software developer, but frankly, not everyone has the ability to become one. A truly skilled software developer needs a pretty big brain, and that can't always be obtained through hard work. Given that you really are among the big brain leagues in computer science, you should definitely find success, but at that point we're looking at 1 in 20 odds at the best.