It depends on how you see your career evolving. If you pick computing you will have to shift gears, eventually - which isn't to say you will switch OUT of compu

It depends on how you see your career evolving. If you pick computing you will have to shift gears, eventually - which isn't to say you will switch OUT of computing, but rather you will eventually need to ADD to it. Right now, computing behaves both like a trade and like a profession depending on the lens you use. You just so happen to be able to get a job based on tech stack at the moment (like a trade), I believe the trade aspects of it will go away as tooling becomes more sophisticated (10+ years), leaving the profession bit. I believe this is already happening; the distribution of compensation has become far more bimodal in the US since I started in 2009. I often meet tech professionals not living in sf/ba that don't even believe me when I say a 200k/yr+ comp package for a non-executive is possible. Either way, in computing at the moment, there's no licensing or regulatory body, and the obligatory cartel that manages it, so it's hard to predict the specifics around what the profession piece will look like in 10 years. I'll attempt it, if you excuse the conceit. I suspect as tooling matures, the industry will decompose into larger numbers of smaller firms, in which a smaller number of people will be needed to create and maintain more and more specialized applications. The differentiating factor in comp and career growth will be business domain knowledge, as opposed to deep knowledge of particular technologies. It's already the case, for example, that firms don't have to field an ops team of 5+ just to get a good deploy process going. The idea that I can get handed a fairly comprehensible spec and just write code all day may go away but computing as a career won't.