"Sorry, I probably won't hire you"

Title of a Wall St Journal opinion piece.  The author, president of a New York ad-tech company, was saying that candidates who couldn't program a computer were in his opinion too poorly educated to consider for a job. 
  I tend to agree with him.  I learned FORTRAN programming in college, and it was the reason I got a number of different jobs over my career.  Over the years I became fluent in C, C++, PDP-8 assembly language, PDP-11 assembly language, Z-80 assembly language, BASIC, 8086 assembly language, Modula-2, 68300 assembly language, Pascal, and SPS-81 DSP assembly language, and probably a few others that escape me just now.
   Ability to program kept me gainfully employed and my family supported for forty years.
   Certainly programming is a  much more worthwhile college subject than gender studies, black studies, sexual studies, sociology, political science, peace and justice, art history, education and underwater basket weaving.
   Getting a computer program to work means you under stood the problem correctly, (easier said than done) and were able to express the solution clearly and correctly in an obscure artificial language.  An unforgiving language that will do evil things for a single misplaced punctuation mark.  A person who can do that, is able to write a proposal, or a specification, or a user's manual that worth someone's time to read.  With some practical programming experience a person can estimate the degree of difficulty of a new product development project, and may have a chance of understanding what the technical people on the project are saying.  When I'm hiring and I have a choice between a programmer and a non programmer I'm gonna hire the programmer 'cause programming demonstrates real thinking ability which a gender studies major does not.
   A pity that few college graduates bother to learn to program while they are in college.  Fortunately programming can be picked up by self study.  You get a book, you download the necessary compiler, and you work the homework problems.  Coding is fun, like woodworking, oil painting, or video games and only ordinary levels of motivation are required to get pretty good at it.  A good reason for picking C, is the existence of  a really marvelous book, "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie.  Paperback, it's only 3/8 inch thick and contains everything anyone will ever need to know about C, and it's all written in real English.