Skilled trades are a great option for a mediocre student with no real interests, but it's not really an ideal alternative to tech.
A smart, ambitious person in a skilled trade (or even not so skilled) can can make a lot of money and have rewarding work. My neighbor prints money as running an excavation & dumptruck business. He uses the cash to buy property and find his wife's fledgling business.
Every time a building burns, floods, etc in my city, he has a 1/5 chance of making about $75k at 80% margin. And that is a tiny part of the business.
Work at Google for 10 years and you'll have plenty of money to buy any property you want.
It's not like this is something we have to debate. The average developer easily makes more than the average plumber, with a lot more potential for upside. [1] [2]
[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/S...
[2] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate
The median home value in Palo Alto is $2.5M per Zillow; in neighboring Menlo Park with comparable schools it's $2M. If you cross I-280 for larger lot sizes (and generally, though not always, more house square footage) you'll see the median home value in Portola Valley is $3.8M. If you don't like those figures, you can look at Trulia's, which says the median sales price for Palo Alto is $2.5M and the mean listing price is $3M.
Note these are generally not luxurious properties at those prices. Many are small postwar ranchers or Eichlers (beautiful but a pain to update) that have not been renovated in decades. Some houses have negative value because they're teardowns; you'd buy the property for the land.
After taking into account housing costs and California's aggressively progressive tax regime, you may find that $250K salary does not go as far as you like. You may make 2x-3x as much--but your cost for comparable housing may be 10x-15x as high and your tax burden will be more oppressive as well.
Not to mention that as a programmer you have the option of working remotely (for a healthy 6-figure salary) for whatever low-cost place you like.
Regarding programmers doing remote work they are the exception, and probably account for 1-5% of all developers I would guess. Regardless, they are definitely not representative of the average developer - which is what we were discussing.
You can build a $5M plumbing/electrical/etc business in any location and live a much better quality of life.
If the average outcome for plumbers is owning $5M businesses, it's amazing how that doesn't show up in any statistics I've seen.
Both of my parents work in the trades. People on Hacker News glamorize it far too much. It's much more frequently a case of intermittent employment and low wages—even when you do own your own business (as both of them have at various times).
It's an important distinction. Computer programming is just about the only white-collar job left on Earth that still has a healthy demand relative to the supply so you can get a decently paid job where you aren't abused all that much, so if you have an aptitude for it, by all means go that route (whether via college or not, is a separate question).
But what's the job market like these days for mathematicians, physicists, mechanical engineers? I get the impression it's bad enough that if you put the same ingenuity and effort into a blue-collar trade you'd get better returns.
The problem with this adage is the numbers game. A students may be rare and C students plentiful, but owners are rare too. So while some C students may become owners, most will be far less successful.
I'm not much of an academic type myself. I was talking about careers: you're going to make a lot more money and have much more impact as a developer/software guy than as a tradesman.
I don't know of (m)any software developers working for plumbers.
Do you take great satisfaction and pleasure in working with your hands and working on concrete projects?
Do you want to live someplace outside the big-money tech bubbles?
Maybe you don't care about impacting the world - you just want to make a nice living and hang out with your family.
I'm sure there's others.
What I was arguing against is this idea that someone becoming a plumber is the economically superior option.