Oh where to begin?!

Okay. Find out what you love doing and learn it. Every career is going to have some kind of need for tech workers.

I have a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science and a master’s in anthropology. Having something that you really enjoy allows you to gain domain knowledge. If you’re passionate about this and about tech, then you’ll learn a ton of stuff on your own through sheer love of the topics.

Depending on your age, you may also want to do some introspection. I started my undergraduate studies in physics and realized I had way more fun writing the simulation software than with the actual subject. But I had no idea what I actually wanted to do until I was around 23 and had gained enough experience as to what to expect for each field.

Degree programs in computer science are intense. There’s a ton of math, though every day I’m happy that I paid attention in linear algebra. And the electrical engineering courses are still invaluable for my hobbyist projects.

• Degree: Anything in engineering is ideal. Computer science is also fantastic if you think you can handle the course load. I’ve seen amazing systems architects with degrees in Russian literature and shitty programmers with degrees in CS.

• Fields: These are nebulous. Infosec is probably the most misunderstood. There are very few hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks. There is, however, more paperwork for a major pen test than there is for a mortgage. DevOps is where I landed and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Network admins are the drummers of the IT world; nobody is sure what they do, but we know that they’re important.

• Avoidance: The gaming industry. Long hours, insane deadlines, and middling pay. The financial sector is soul crushing. (I quit a job there without a landing spot simply because I couldn’t deal with how badly we were fucking over consumers).

More opinionated: AI is a bubble that will pop. Getting a job in that field is easy right now. But the knowledge required to advance in that field is an order of magnitude higher than most people expect. And the math involved is not something that most people can “pick up” on the job.

Edit:

Learn, master, and love Linux. For people trying to get into the tech field there is no better advice. The world runs on Linux. If you want to do pen testing, operations, server administration, etc. then skills here are not optional. Even environments that are nominally Windows will almost always use Linux systems on their edges.

Python is a great general purpose language to learn. Vi(m) is also good to learn. Not for text editing, but Vim dueling is our version of a street fight.