Some brief history about myself - I have a BS in Game Design and Development, I've worked in game development, cluster computing, trading systems, web services, cloud platforms, databases, and now robotics. I've been at this personally and professionally for 37 years. Also, my brother is a world leading security expert.

You're 16, you're in high school. HIT THE MATHS. You don't even know it, but nothing is more important to you right now. The most common, boring, uninteresting, lowest paying labors in this industry are presentation and business logic. Slightly more interesting is infrastructure because you're dealing with big-data structural issues and throughput.

The better you are at math, the higher level in the industry you're going to gain access. Our leading problems today are all going to be modeled in linear algebra and calculus. You can either do it - or you can't, and that will relegate you forever to the lower tiers.

This will make you a high value engineer, +$200k. You'll also want to pick up some stats. If you learn finance, you can become a quant, and they make $200k-$1m, but you'll be dedicating yourself to the finance industry - the people and the cocaine drives me fucking crazy, so I have a love/hate relationship with it, love the money, and the tech, and finance is fascinating, but I hate the rest.

You can pursue game development, if you want - don't go to school for it. I did, but that was 25 years ago, the industry was different then. There were only TWO schools that offered degrees, and that carried clout. Now every university offers a game-dev program, and I've been on a few of those review panels, they suck.

Instead, get a traditional comp-sci degree, a 4 year BS at least. A masters would be wise, it'll pay for itself faster. Seriously consider applying to top tier schools like Cal Tech, Standford, Berkeley, UofI, MIT, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Yale... Let them tell you no, don't decide on their behalf. You might be surprised - some of those in that list are more accessible to you than you realize; I leave that for you to figure out. Taking yourself seriously, dedicating yourself to your work, and fostering good relationships with influential people who can write a letter of recommendation goes a long-ass way.

You go to college not to learn a trade - it's not a vocational school. You go there to learn how to learn. The programming classes are the least important. You need to learn the fundamentals, the maths, the abstracts. I don't care what language you program in, that's an implementation detail. What I need is for you to understand the problem and think through a solution. I need you to write it down and communicate it. None of this figuring it out as you go bullshit.

Regardless, this is what the game industry looks for - good fundamentals. It's worth having, because if you want game-dev, you need a plan for AFTER game-dev. Very few stay in the industry for long. Eventually you realize the only people who care you're a game developer are middle-school boys, and only if you work on games they like. If you ever want a girlfriend - not while you're in the industry; the time you allocate to games is time you're not allocating to her.

Now about hacking and security... The best in the industry are people you'll never hear of. They don't talk, they listen. Hacking and security is a glamour job - so the industry is saturated with rockstars and egotists, trying to make a name for themselves. That's how you know they're seen as amateurs by the industry.

Penetration testing sounds fun, but has very limited industry value and doesn't actually get much use.

Let me just say it like this - disrupting foreign adversaries and cyber criminals gets a bounty put on your head, and the heads of all your known friends and family, just to get to you. What's $10k to get someone to put a pipe bomb under your car? My brother is retired now (not because he's old), but can never fly on a plane with family or colleagues.

And that's why everyone you've ever heard of is fucking bullshit. A lot of people shunt out of the industry the instant the threats come in, and if you're making yourself publicly known for what you've done to these hostile agents, they and their partners will get to you all the faster.

Not that these people don't have skills, but that it's a hobby, not a serious occupation.

The 9-5 boring (I mean that jokingly) security job is consulting, hardening, and analysis. More passive things - how not to get hacked, how you got hacked... Help corporate enterprises shore up their infrastructure, and people don't necessarily try to murder you for it.