My fiancee and brother are both architects. I'm quite familiar with this career. I work as a professional software dev in the Bay Area. One thing you'll find r

My fiancee and brother are both architects. I'm quite familiar with this career. I work as a professional software dev in the Bay Area. One thing you'll find really quickly: there's not nearly as much focus on credentialing and licensing in software, compared to architecture. Like, I'm talking, zero. No AIA, no AREs, none of it. My advice: focus on getting an education, but realize your education can come from a lot of places. If you want to be a software dev but aren't sure exactly what you want to do, just take the first job you can get and work your way up. You can absolutely get to the top of the profession this way (Google, etc.), it will just take a while. Advantage: practical work experience, cash earnings. You need to find a place that will invest in you and your skills though; most startups won't do this, so avoid them. Look for a great manager and a balanced team of junior/mid/senior people with strong engineering leadership, and a good culture of code review, learning, and leveling-up. [2] Graduate programs in CS are better if you want to get into a special area of computing that requires a lot of theoretical learning. The more established the field, the more you'll need graduate education. You can probably "sneak in" to some of the newer subfields with high demand, like genetics or machine learning/AI. If you want to do signal/image processing, you'll need graduate school. You won't get a job at a big, high-paying company without work experience or a degree. Feel free to try, but the AmaGooFaceSofts don't really recruit for the jobs you want to get [1] without the right degree or work experience. People say otherwise, but they're basically full of shit. I wouldn't advise going to university for you. You've presumably already got a BA or BS, so you've gained a lot of the non-disciplinary benefits of college (how to write well, how to organize and structure your time, etc). If you really just want vocational cross-training, find a good company and clock up a few years of work experience. Feel free to email me for more on this topic, email is in my sig. [1] You can probably get dead-end, low-status jobs in a bigco with the right credentials, but you'll do better avoiding these. [2] This can be very hard to spot/recognize unless you've been in the field for a while. Try to figure out who works there and back-channel to figure out what it's like working there. All crunch time, endless death march, all senior people with no juniors, all promotions from outside (no internal talent growth) = avoid. Probably 90% of startups and most tech companies in general are terrible in this regard; everyone's in such a damned hurry all the time.