People with good software skills had paths to making a lot of money from the day computers became widely available.
Look at Woz in the 70s or Microsoft or the Macintosh team. From the birth of the PC revolution there was a path to getting rich from computer skills if you were in the right place at the right time.
My aunt's career as an IT engineer started in the 80s. She went into this field because it was a new niche to explore and hardly anyone knew their way around it.
Her role was to take part in digitalisation of the bank she was working in and by "digitalisation" I mean first putting the equipment together.
That wasn't it. It's just that the position wasn't so highly paid back in the day and there was way less demand, so hardly anyone was even interested.
The moment it became remotely attractive, the tech bros arrived.