First off, programming is a Red Queen Race. Anyone deciding "I'm good at programming _now_, it's going to stay like this forever" is sorely mistaken. Without co

First off, programming is a Red Queen Race. Anyone deciding "I'm good at programming _now_, it's going to stay like this forever" is sorely mistaken. Without continuous improvement, programming skills are at least stagnating - not good when the rest of the universe is evolving. So, "getting good at 18" is no guarantee of anything. Also, there isn't a programmer encompassing everything - so I'd suggest, in your free time (of which you may have less, I admit), starting a hobby project (or joining a project) which would be radically different from what you're doing as a job. E.g. doing web frontend coding? Try low-level hardware systems (Raspberry Pi), or image detection, or emulation of ancient systems, or perhaps something integrated into RL ("Internet of things").