Did you become specialized in a different field than you originally aimed for and would you like to change that in the future?

For example, in my case, I did. I wanted to be a purely Front-End developer. I entered the business as a top-tier helpdesk agent, then started out as a back-end programmer and then I was hired again as a back-end programmer.

Even though I had constantly been looking for front-end opportunities, I've ended up in back-end because the front-end positions were apparently put away for those who already had tons of previous experience while I had none.

Perhaps someday I will pick up the thread again and become a Front-End developer. Who knows - only I do, for a part. I still have tons to learn. Build your own future!

Oh boy, I have had a long and winding road that led to my current occupation. I spent a good decade or so planning to go into game development, but ended up with a degree in network administration. Took a detour into IT for a couple years and then wound up as a Cloud Systems Engineer instead.

@EmberQuill Madness. :O Are you looking to get into Game Development, still?

@CaptainRant not really. Turns out that I actually enjoy working on cloud automation. It's an interesting and evolving field. Maybe I'll make some indie games some time for fun, but I think I wouldn't have enjoyed making a career out of it.

My original majors (and final minors) were biochem-e and materials science.

Original intent: Game Dev.
Resulting career: Web Dev.

Did both. Game dev is so much more interesting and rewarding. And so so much worse for burnout. Got stuck in web dev because it’s easy and finding work was often trivial.

Hopefully next: Trading.

Not exactly but I did study something else than what I'm doing now.

I really wanted to become a cybersecurity specialist/engineer since I was in highschool but this mostly requires high study levels.

That doesn't work for me as for the way I learn so I entered a software development study at a lower level to understand more about how software works so I could apply that to cybersecurity.

I got a lucky break and got hired as a cybersecurity engineer due to my own experience!

@Root my career is similar. But I started in marketing and economics briefly before programming professionally. Got into it for game dev, realized I had no interest in working on other people's games and I'm not willing to work 80 hours a week for little payoff when I could just do web dev, work well less and make way more. I did work in game dev for a while though. Was absolutely horrible. Long hours, crap pay, and usually the games I was working on where horribly uninteresting.

Started out as an Electronic Engineer student in university modding guitar pedals, then I discovered FPGAs and wanted to go that way. While learning DSP, as a guitarist I was in love with audio processing so starter messing with Pure Data and then I discovered also video processing and in particular visual art, so started to learn programming with Processing and p5.js as an hobby. While doing that I decided to switch from electronic to Computer Engineering and learned C++ and Python with which I started competitive programming. While still studying I found a job as a helpdesk and found out I was pretty good at that, then replaced a tech guy who suddenly left his job and learned also about networking and IT systems so now I'm a Sysadmin and work in a computer repair shop part time while writing my thesis about LTE based Internet of Drones, but still thinking about DSP and guitar pedals as a career and enjoying computer generated art and competitive coding in my free time.

What a mess.

@Root You are an inspiring person! <3

@linuxxx Very nice. :) OWASP greetings. :P

@CaptainRant ☺️