This is an assembly of miscellaneous comments:
Chemical Engineering or Materials Science might end up being fields that interest your son. Both are lucrative as far as salaries.
I searched for computational chemistry, and much of the research seems to be related to simulation of bond angles and protein folding.
I searched for chemistry courses that involve computers at my son’s college (Caltech), and got matches on “Nature of the Chemical Bond” and “Atomic-Level Simulations of Materials and Molecules.” These both appear to use existing software as part of the class.
Plenty of Caltech students, particularly CS majors, head straight to industry. I’m not finding data right now, but the figure I recall is ~70% don’t head to grad school from CS. There are a lot of CS jobs out there now! Also, lots of science PhDs go to industry or non-academic research labs. The only stats I’ve looked at for this are physics instead of chemistry, though.
Note that the borderline between physics and chemistry is blurry, so a lot of what some might view as computational chemistry might be called computational physics. Physics departments appear to have more computational courses than chemistry departments. My son’s physics degree plan requires at least one programming course and suggests others.
Programming skills are important in physics research. My son did research at a UC physics lab while in high school. Most of his work was programming and getting unrelated instruments to talk to each other. One of the tasks his professor gave him was to communicate with and give tours to undergrads who were looking for undergrad research. He was told to ask if they had taken any CS courses. If the answer was no, he was supposed to tell them to take the intro CS course and then check back for research opportunities.
You might want to ask about computational chemistry in the Science Majors forum (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/science-majors/). There are some professors who seem to reply only there.