There were plenty of CS majors when I was an undergrad and right after I started working in the computer technology field. This was the period when CS departments were rapidly expanding due to the late '90s/early ‘00s dotcom boom and many undergrad flooded into those departments. However, quite a few supervisors/hiring managers found the techie chops and potential to rapidly getting up to speed to their firms’ standards varied greatly among CS departments and even within a pool of candidates from respectable/elite CS programs.
In fact, some of my supervisors/hiring managers have later mentioned that they’ve turned down many CS/IT majors in favor of folks without such majors because they felt the latter either had far greater techie chops and/or they demonstrated greater potential of being able to get up to speed to their proficiency standards with a few weeks of training. Several CS majors who were hired alongside myself and some non-CS majors were let go within the probationary period because they weren’t able to get themselves up to speed in terms of required techie chops while the latter were retained because they were able to do so.
It’s actually probably easier these days for someone with a non-tech background to get a technical job in tech/science because of the proliferation of online learning, short courses, and certificate programs. Any reasonably intelligent college graduate can learn how to program if they really want to - learning to code is not exactly rocket science, let’s be real. What makes the best software developers is not necessarily the raw technical skill of coding but the coding skill COMBINED with a lot of problem-solving and creativity. That’s why they do coding interviews with hard problems - tech companies are not just concerned with whether or not you can write code (because they could just ask for work samples) but also interested in HOW you code and work through problems when you encounter them.
And
Tech companies don’t just need software developers and data analysts. They’re a huge part of the company, no doubt, but somebody has to make sure all those developers get their paychecks on time, or that there’s money in the company account for them to buy their new fancy equipment, or that they know how to make human-centered design so that people can actually use their fancy new inventions (hello, my name is Juillet and I’m a UX researcher!), or that the manuals that go along with their work make sense and give instructions in an easy-to-read format, or that they don’t get the stuffing sued out of them because their toy is too similar to the other guy’s toy, or that people actually know that their new invention exists and buys it…
Developing expertise in online content creation goes a long way. You actually need sound liberal arts formation to understand how to connect people with relevant information. Copywriting, social media management, image curation, market research… all of these domains are wide open to people who have developed digital literacy as a part of a liberal arts education.