Computing Careers 2026

What the evidence says, and what nobody knows

Most career advice about computing is written by people selling something — a course, a bootcamp, a placement, a subscription.

This book is written the other way round. Forty-six computing careers, each scored on the same ten things that decide whether a job is worth having. Every number carries where it came from, when it was measured, and how much to trust it.

And where the evidence does not exist, the book says so instead of guessing. There is an appendix listing everything it could not find out.

What it is

A method, and forty-six worked examples of that method.

The first half teaches you to read a job market: how to tell a real number from a marketing number, why most salary figures are worthless, and how to check any training provider before you pay them. It works on any career, not just the ones in here. That half is free — read it now, all six chapters, no email required.

The second half is the reference. Forty-six careers, each scored on pay, competition, entry route, cost to get in, cost to stay in, exposure to AI, geography, remote viability, other disruption, and what employers actually screen for.

You read the first half. You look things up in the second. If you are holding a job advertisement and do not know what the title means, the index of 452 job titles maps it to whatever covers that work.

Why it is different

Every figure in this book is graded from 1 to 5, and the grade is printed beside it.

Grade 1 is a government body that can compel an answer and has nothing to sell you. Grade 5 is somebody selling something. Salary comparison websites are grade 4, and the book explains at length why you should not act on them.

That grading is applied, not announced. It produces uncomfortable results and they are all printed:

• Where a career has no pay figure meeting the book’s own standard, the score is a dash. Not a guess. A dash.
• Where a figure is real but measures the wrong people, it is marked with a dagger and the reason is printed next to it.
• The chapter that explains all this prints a table of how many careers actually clear the bar. Most do not.

A book that hid those numbers would look more authoritative. This one would rather you could check it. It is published under no author’s name, and why, and what to check instead of a byline, is set out in full.

Every source it used is published here, free, with its grade.

What it does not know

There is an appendix — a long one — that exists only to list what is missing.

Almost nobody publishes how long it takes to enter a computing career. Two countries do, and this book said they did not until a researcher read Polish and Italian — that correction is printed in the book, in the chapter that makes the claim. Nobody counts most of these jobs. Pay data outside the United States and Western Europe is thin to absent, and the book has a chapter explaining why.

That appendix is published in full and for free, before you buy anything. Read what the book does not know and decide whether the rest is worth your money.

Who it is for

• Graduates who cannot get a first job and want to know whether it is them or the market
• Students choosing subjects, and parents being sold expensive courses
• Career changers deciding whether the move is worth it
• Anyone already in support, testing or admin work who wants out and up
• Readers in India, Nigeria, the Philippines and elsewhere who are tired of advice that assumes San Francisco

There are two country annexes and a third covering six more markets, because “get a remote job” is different advice depending on how your money gets home.

Who it is not for

If you want to be told that one bootcamp will change your life, this is the wrong book. It names crowded doors that expensive courses are still selling, and it says which certificates no longer work.

It also prices them. The exam fee a certificate advertises is not what it costs you, because the renewal rule decides that and the renewal rule sits on a different page: what a tech certification costs to hold for ten years.

That is one of the findings published in full — single questions settled from the book’s own sources, free to read, with the grade of every figure printed beside it and a note on what it does not tell you.

What you get

• EPUB — the accessible edition. Phones, e-readers, any reading app.
• PDF — the fixed 6×9 edition. Screens and printing.
• The data — every source, every figure, every gap, as CSV and JSON. Sort it, check it, argue with it.

Both formats in one purchase. You did not buy a format.

The EPUB meets EPUB Accessibility 1.1 at WCAG 2.1 AA, verified with the DAISY Ace checker. If you read with assistive technology, this book was built for you rather than retrofitted.

How it reaches you

The download link is emailed to the address you use at checkout, and the same link stays available in the payment provider’s customer portal, so you can fetch the files again later without having to ask anyone.

The page you land on straight after paying shows your invoice, not the book. That is how the checkout works, and it is worth saying here because it looks like something has gone wrong when it has not. The files are in the email.

Price

$19 until 4 October 2026. After that it is $29 and stays there. A launch price that never ends is a fake price, and this book spends twenty chapters teaching readers to spot one.

That is the most anyone pays. $29 is a different amount of money in different places, and this book is written for readers in markets where it is real money. So the checkout adjusts the price down to where you are buying from, automatically. You do not have to ask for that and you do not have to prove anything to get it.

If it is still out of reach, write and ask, and it is yours. No means test, no explanation needed. Asking is not a favour and it will not be treated as one.

What your copy includes

Every correction to this edition, for as long as corrections are made.

If a figure in this book turns out to be wrong, being told so is part of what you already paid for, and it is not a separate product.

The line: anything that makes the book more accurate is included. Anything that makes it bigger is a new edition. A source revising its figure, a newer year of the same table, a chapter rewritten because it was wrong — all yours. New countries and new careers are a new book.

There is no schedule attached to any of that, deliberately. A correction ships when it is found, not on a calendar.

A correction is not an upsell. This book is sold on the claim that its figures are checkable. Charging you to be told that one of them was wrong would put the evidence behind a second payment.