From the comments

With the caveat that not all CS majors are great programmers, I wish that more of the econ/finance types that work with me and do programming all day long were better programmers.

(I also wish the IT guys who build our data infrastructure knew a little more about finance, but that’s another story.)

What about no major – or in that case – no degree period?

The irony here is that we are talking about majors for IT careers in an industry that remains one of the few that you can get into and be successful without a degree. Does it hold you back? In my experience if you are good at what you do than it doesn’t matter. The degree question has come up only once in my career. And i was still hired and because the only person on staff that did not have a masters or doctorate.

H5,

Market failure? I don’t know. But there’s certainly a market opportunity for anyone who can figure out how to transfer domain knowledge to an expert implementer. If you have a programming assistant and he doesn’t know much about your subject, you’ll have to spec it out to him in such detail that it’s practically like writing the program yourself. The expert software systems that convert R or LaTeX into fast running assembly code (but cleanse all your data first) are still a few years away.

I’ve found my niche as a well-rounded computer/finance guy (though maybe that’s the only way that I’m well rounded), but I like both of those subjects. If it doesn’t bore you to tears, let me recommend that you work on becoming an intermediate programmer. In the long run, you will get more economics done.

One other thing: nobody ever mistook me for a great economist (even 15 years after getting my Ph.D.), but I was able to teach myself to be a hot sh*t programmer amongst economics faculty in a couple of years. The economics was much harder, but I’m still sure that’s where my comparative advantage is.

Perhaps the real market failure is that no one has come up with software that allows economists to easily create their models without investing a ton of time in line-by-line coding? But don’t look at me to correct it, I’m an EE who went into analog, in part to avoid the all the coding the digital folks have to do. Of course that isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of opportunity to do coding even as an analog designer.

I was a math major, and now I’m in graduate school in math. However, given the volatility in the labor market for teaching assistants at my school, I’m taking programming courses in case I lose my assistantship. I don’t want to be a programmer in the long run, but it might be useful in the next few years.