I had folk give me similar advice when I was young. It's dumb advice. Imagine you go the coder route. When you going to specialise in there. Big data? Database

I had folk give me similar advice when I was young. It's dumb advice. Imagine you go the coder route. When you going to specialise in there. Big data? Databases? Embedded coding? 3D graphics? Game coding? Web app coding? Front-end? Back-end? Testing? People can make careers out of any of them - and many more besides. It's pretty much impossible to be an expert in everything on the coder side. Imagine you go the designer route. What are you going to specialise in there? User testing? Icon design? Branding? Web design? Print design? Interaction design? Information Architecture? People can make careers out of any of them - and many more besides. It's pretty much impossible to be an expert in everything on the design side. I've had a pretty successful career with a bunch of things from the developer side and a bunch of things from the designer/UX side.... and some other bits and bobs from other things like project management and business folk. I'm really good at interaction design. I'm really lousy at visual design. I'm really good at testing. I have no embedded coding skills. I'm great at... well... you get the idea... Design and Development aren't "things". They're communities of practice. They're social constructs. New ones appear and disappear over time. Pick "front-end developer" for example. Twenty years ago that role didn't exist. A bit of layout knowledge. I bit of a design eye. A bit of development. A bit of markup. And so on. Those skills existed - but there wasn't a 'role' where you needed to be expert in all of them. In another ten or twenty years I'll be surprised if anything like "front end developer" exists in the same way (look at how folk using stuff like node.js blurs the coding side of front/back end development for example). Figure out what you want to do. Then acquire the skills you need to do that - and be excellent at those. The choice isn't between being a design expert and a development expert. Instead make a choice to be excellent at the things you enjoy and are good at - and then go find career where you can use those skills.