Too soon to tell if it'll lead to "fulfilling careers" but both my kids learnt Scratch very early on, in the 2nd grade or so, and found they had a knack for programming. Based on that I prodded them to dabble in Python. Now in high school, at least the older one is already planning a career in software engineering.

(He also teaches elementary schoolers Scratch at a Coder School location, and they seem to like it.)

The visual game-building aspect is an immediate draw, of course, but I also think the block-based approach is a great analogue to building things with Lego. It just clicks for some kids. It is also fairly representative of most coding, in the sense you assemble "blocks" comprising commands / statements / function calls in a particular order based on the shapes of their inputs and ouputs to build a larger structure.

One thing my kids struggled a bit with was going from the event-based nature of Scratch to the more linear nature of Python, along with the concept of scopes. It led to some form of "magical" thinking where they assumed e.g. a function / variable would be reachable based just on its signature / type. But other than that most concepts transferred over easily enough to conventional languages.

"Too soon to tell if it'll lead to "fulfilling careers" but both my kids learnt Scratch very early on…"

And indeed, who cares if Scratch leads to a fulfilling career? "Computer literacy" is even more important these days—understanding what goes on behind the curtain. Scratch (and a whole lot of other things) show children that it's not magic—it's just a machine following instructions.

(Never mind whether software engineering can be described as fulfilling.

"The paramedic thinks I'm clever because I play guitar,

I think she's clever because she stops people dying."

Courtney Barnett— )