"Despite good job prospects, graduates think that a job in IT would be boring. Is this because of the fact that Bill Gates has made the whole industry look nerdy?

Are you really trying to blame this on Bill Gates?
"I mean really? The man is the poster child for why you SHOULD get into IT... I don't think anyone looks at Bill Gates, with his billions of dollars, happy family, and from an outsider's point of view "good life," and says "Nope... don't want to be a nerd like that!"

People think it's boring because, generally speaking, it can get VERY monotonous. If you don't like programming (regardless of how you define the word), you won't like IT. If you don't like long hours trying to figure out why something isn't working on 1 out of 1000 machines, you probably won't like IT either. I'm not going to get into a "You might be a redneck if..." stream here, but I think you get my point.

If the corporate world is honestly having problems finding IT people, they should either (A) Outsource to a reliable partner, or (B) offer more money. Long story short, IT is like any other job on the planet, if you offer people enough money, they'll gladly do it.

"Perhaps it's a sign that the IT industry is growing up. Writing software is becoming much more like engineering and a lot less like pioneering.

Engineering in all its facets (from civil engineering to mechanical engineering to chemical engineering) is sometimes considered "boring" too............

With software development there simply is a lot of (to me elegant and beautiful, to others dead and boring) scientific background knowledge you should have (algorithms, data-structures, compiler design, finite automata, complexity theory, concurrency theory, discrete mathematics, and numerical mathematics) supplemented by more applied knowledge like the principles of software engineering, in-depth knowledge of at least three programming languages (C, C++, Java), some experience with the object hierarchy underlying modern GUIs, and probably a lot I forgot.

And when you've done all that and appear for your first job, you may find you'll be on some project team and entrusted with responsibility for building component X of subsystem Y according to specifications someone will give you. You write your code, construct your test-cases, and verify correctness, document your functions, check in your code, and rush off to the next specification you'll implement because you've got to meet productivity standards or you're out."

For what it's worth, I think it is more about enthusing younsters about a career in IT - and for some that may mean finding out at a early age that they are actually very good at mathmatics and that applying this in computer sciences could provide them with a very succcessful and lucrative career. This may be a simplistic answer to what is a huge debate and one in which Computer Weekly will continue to be involved, because IT matters to businesses and to the economic health of this country.