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I am an engineering manager and the biggest change I've seen is the motivation. Me, and other older millennials and younger Xers who grew up tinkering with our PCs would never think of doing anything else for a living. We're in tech because we're into tech. The new generation is different: they're in tech because it pays well. There's such a huge demand for tech workers that zoomers' CVs mostly look like this:
burger flipper
call center operator
tech boot camp
tester/data engineer/front-end dev
As soon as I wrote that I realized that the older generations were different. They didn't have PCs growing up. My (very good) architect didn't even have a PC at home until his daughter needed one for school. He majored in chemistry, not CS. Another guy I know ended up working with computers because he was a handyman in a research institute the director of which decided to start a computer importing business. He forgot his keys on the day the shipment arrived, my guy picked the lock open, then picked it closed and was hired for being resourceful.
However, both these guys have a very important shared characteristic: they are very smart. Guy #1 wasn't a simple chemist major but won not-just-participation prizes in All-Union Chemistry Olympiads. Guy #2 is a just a natural-born engineer, trucks to transistors.
And this brings me to the question of scale.
You can't scale the way my older colleagues ended up in software engineering
You could try to scale the way I ended up in software engineering: give everyone a Linux PC with a bunch of compilers and interpreters and wait for the nerds to emerge, but I think that wouldn't work as well as it worked in the 90's: everything is just too user-friendly these days. I drive a car, but have no intention of becoming a car nerd
And finally, this leaves formal schooling as the only thing that can scale
And schools have to be schizophrenic in their curriculum. They have to teach math so people can calculate the tip and plan their spending, literature so people can read and understand references in summer blockbusters, history so they can pick a new name for their street, computers so they don't install malware and can search for stuff online. On the other hand, they have to create people who will become mathematicians, writers, historians and programmers. The only way they can do that is by forcing their students to try everything. Do they hate math? Do they love math? Do they not care either way, but are good at it?
While I think Processing is not the best tool for college-level education, I think Processing/Logo/drawing primitives in Basic/XNA/Love2D are a good introduction to programming at middle-to-high school level. The goal is to comb the student body for people who are not into programming, but are good at it nevertheless.
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