u/readet covered probably the most common CS jobs but I can think of a few more. Academic: PhD, university lecturer, teaching in general. If you like research but would also like something more hands-on and better paid, you could try joining a company's R&D department. It is very rare for a company to maintain an R&D department with people on it full-time but you may be able to do this if you work for the likes of Google or Amazon. Pros: continuously learning new things, solving interesting problems in new ways. Teaching people? Cons: academic research is exhausting from a finance point of view. You're applying for grants all the time to keep going or have to do lecturing. Also, if you like building stuff and not just thinking and writing about it, it may become boring. The whole teaching aspect? I mean, it wholly depends on the person. Desktop application developer: these jobs are becoming increasingly scarce with the advent of React, Electron, etc. There's just very little need for consumer desktop applications to be around nowadays, as most stuff is done on the web now and if not, you can just package your site as an Electron app and call it a native desktop app. Users will be none the wiser. If you really want to become a traditional desktop app user, you'll probably have to apply on a product basis (get a job in a company that develop a successful, well established desktop app like MS Office or Adobe Creative Suite, for instance). Otherwise you may end up maintaing legacy desktop apps nobody would want to touch in their sane mind. Pros: if you don't like building websites, think HTML/CSS/JS is not real coding or don't like web programming languages, you can stay clear of them and use whichever language you want. Cons: difficult to find a job in this area nowadays. Embedded software developer: writing C, C++, assembly programmes for microcontrollers, embedded devices of all sorts, device drivers, etc. Pros: well paid, very cool if you're into low-level development, it's cool to see that your program has visible implications on the real world. This depends on what you're building of course. Cons: difficult, usually a background in electronics is appreciated as you'll be directly interfacing with physical devices. Prior experience is usually required in most job positions in the embedded space. Data scientist: big data, data analytics and reporting, data warehouse, perhaps some AI. Hadoop, Apache Spark, Splunk and much more which I don't know about myself. Pros: very well paid as everyone wants to do big data and AI now. Cons: requires loads of experience (even a degree of its own sometimes) Sysadmin/tech support: your friendly system administrator job! Usually involves, as its name implies, maintaining the a company's IT infrastructure: networking, server setup, sorting out people's IT issues... Pros: entry barrier is lower. Usually a degree is not required, perhaps just some certifications. Very hands-on. Cons: usually stressful, depending on how short you're on IT support personnel, you may end up spending most of your workday sorting out petty problems like antivirus, PDF's not opening, misconfigured email accounts... DevOps: DevOps people aim to bridge application development and deployment with their holistic skillset. These are people who have a extensive knowledge about best CI/CD practices, build pipelines (Jenkins, Concourse, Circle CI), provisioning (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Foreman) and are comfortable coding to an acceptable level. Their main job is ensuring the application development process is as smooth, automated, predictable and efficient as possible. Pros: for people who prefer to be generalists rather than specialists, this is a good one. Also, the fact that your job consists of improving processes so they're more efficient and reliable feels good. Cons: can feel a bit like tech support sometimes if there's not a good DevOps culture in your company. If you're not careful, you may end up fixing developers' problems rather than improving things. "Why's the pipeline broken? DevOps guy, please fix it!", "Why's the latest version of my code not on the test environment? DevOps guyyyyy!!". Can get a bit tiresome. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): these guys look after the healthy and efficient operation of a particular product or service. You can think of them as operations managers. They have a very broad set of responsibilities: looking after IT infrastructure, security, networking, provisioning, performance, monitoring, logs... In a nutshell, their job is to make sure a service (e.g. a website like Facebook) stays up and responsive. Pros: these jobs are in high demand at the moment and therefore companies are happy to pay big bucks for it. Cons: loads of experience and qualifications required. This is a senior-level position exclusively. Cloud architect: they design cloud-based systems. They get a set of business requirements, functional and non-functional constraints and have to turn them into a sound, cost-efficient, highly available, fault tolerant and secure cloud infrastructure. Pros: almost everyone is running their infrastructure on the cloud nowadays, or at least want to migrate to it sooner than later, so there's a lot of demand for people with strong cloud skills. Cons: very high-level and heavy in system design, little coding to do (perhaps some Lambda, Terraform, CloudFormation...). Again, a good amount of experience is required. More on reddit.com

Hey, diving into CS is a smart move! For the big bucks, consider fields like machine learning, artificial intelligence, or cybersecurity. Those areas tend to offer some hefty paychecks. With your passion for coding, you've got a good shot at diving deep into these specialties and making bank. I remember getting into online jobs a while ago. It totally opened up a whole new world for me. I stumbled upon this site doing web development, and it paid way better than I expected. Making money online while chasing your coding dreams is like hitting the jackpot, buddy! More on reddit.com

Software engineering at a company where they own their service/product. A lot of new implementations, interesting problems to solve, latest tech to use, great compensation potential, etc. Just great all around. More on reddit.com

I've worked in a LOT over domains over the past 20 years. I spent about half my career as a consultant, so I've gotten around to a lot of clients. I've worked in seemingly cool domains video games (call of duty PSP back in the day and a distributed massive multiplayer mobile trivia game), medical research lasers, interactive educational course authoring software, design software, big data, galvanic skin response scanners, factory automation, and a few others that slip my mind. And I've worked in seemingly dull domains like insurance underwriting, real estate investor management, drop shipping software, school and hospital management software, contract delivery, internal tools, logistics management, storage shed business management, and junk yard inventory management. And I'll say this: there is VERY LITTLE coupling between what was actually fun and exciting how exciting the actual domain is. Management and culture are the biggest things that make a job uninteresting. And you can have bad management and culture in ANY domain. And ALL domains are MOSTLY not exciting work. But almost ALL domains DO have interesting problems to solve. So the excitement usually comes from being allowed to tackle interesting problems. To take ownership, learn new technologies, and work with others. And that comes down to leadership and culture. Some of the most interesting and rewarding work I've done has been in some of the seemingly dullest domains. I had a GREAT time in insurance, drop shipping, and investor management. And a MISERABLE time at BOTH game companies, working on facial recognition software, working on research lasers, and doing big data. And vice versa. Some of the seemingly boring jobs WERE boring and the seemingly interesting ones WERE interesting. So personally, I no longer worry about the domain. My current domain is cloud-based contract delivery. I've VERY open about the fact that this is a domain I don't care about, and I don't expect anyone else to care about. But I've got a whole department of happy, excited people who love their jobs. Everyone gets to tackle interesting problems, likes the people they work with, is growing in their careers, and has lots of support. We're doing fun things like creating real time delivery pipelines, implementing elegant architectures and security solutions, creating dockerized automated testing environments, and working closely with customers and domain experts to come up with elegant solutions to their problems. It's a FUN job full of knowledgeable experienced people who are happy to be there. And it's literally one of the most boring domains I could imagine. Don't expect any domain to make a job fun or rewarding. Focus on finding a good team and company that needs what you bring to the table. More on reddit.com