What are different career options if I am interested in computers?

There are many options available in the IT world other than being a developer. Business Analysts, Project Management, User Experience Developer/Prototyper, Enterprise or Solution Architects, Database Administrators (DBAs) all involve working with people on a daily basis to elicit requirements, translate requirements into diagrams, prototypes, and project plans. Having a technical background (i.e. understanding what developers have to go through on a day to day basis, understanding how different system components work together, understanding the way data is organized helps you be a better all around IT professional and gives you the greatest opportunity for career growth.

Additionally, you can consider the customer service (either corporate, software, or hardware helpdesk) or a hardware technician (server administrator, telephony engineer, data center engineer).

There are a lot of options available if you are interested in computer. In my field of advertising, I've known people who are good at their job with computer science, MBA, psychology and many different major. Computer science/IT background does enable you a better advantage in advertising field though, since everything is done on computer nowadays. Hope this helps.

I believe what marks out really good candidates in the IT sector is their breath of knowledge and interest. It is very tempting to become very focused on one realm or toolset which may be fashionable at the time in order to maximise short term returns. But having a strong grounding in the real underlying principles of how computing works will really stand to you. I've seen some great developers who can work really well within a given environment but struggle to comprehend what's going on 'under the hood'. Having this strong grounding in the real principles allows you to answer interview (or real world) problems with an more holistic view and will normally undercover the better/more elegant solution.

WRT to options within the IT industry, it is such a board market at the moment and continuing to grow, and having a sound engineering background will help move into whichever realm interests you the most.

At this era, if you are armed with programming skills, you would have many options and advantages in your career paths.

One of the advice I received from an old programmer (at learnpythonthehardway.org) is:

"Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession."

I too was excited about pursuing a career in the Internet. Remember, that these companies need all sorts of skill sets including legal, finance, accounting, HR, workplace resources, corporate communications, marketing, etc. I found a way to make meaningful contributions to leading Internet companies without writing a stitch of code.

Pursue your passions and hopefully, you'll be able to leverage those skills to add value in the industry of your choosing.

Don't discount the sciences, either--all of the physical sciences and most medical sciences, I think, use computers for data collection, data analysis, experimental or device control, communications, etc.

There's also a mixed engineering/artistic side that involves creation of 3D models (for architecture, film industry, science, education, 3D printing, etc.), and of course there's a corresponding 2D field as well (graphic design, logos, brochures, etc.). Both can involve animation, or not, depending on the application.

It sounds like you enjoy the web. If that's so, think about developing products for the web.

If you aren't particularly passionate about programming, look at becoming a designer or product manager. Designers design the experience people have with your product (ie. the layout, the flow of the application, how to optimize someone's enjoyment) and will require artistic abilities both on and off the computer. Product managers drive the product's feature set and think about what is useful for the end user. They constantly think about that killer feature that will bring millions of people to use their product.

Plenty of options - as a software engineer, QA tester, etc. Currently data related jobs are hot and there will be lot of them in future too. So concentrate on data mining, data science, machine learning, business intelligence, etc. Good Luck!

Now a days all the companies getting large amount of data from web traffic. It was real challenge for these companies to identify pattern and analytics out of it. Imagine number of clicks on eBay, Amazon and Walmart on daily basis. These companies struggling to find user pattern/ prediction out of this huge volume of data sets. This gives an opportunity in new ares such as

Data Algorithms
Machine learning
Social networking
Predictive Analytics
Big Data storage and Analytics.
Mobile marketing & etc

This might grow phenominaly reason because more and more users are migrating from traditional shopping to online across the world.

Another area to look at is a technical writer. All those developers and programmers out there struggle to put into words what their products do, so technical writers are the ones that build the manuals, write the books, and make the user experience more enjoyable. If you enjoy writing, then that might be something else to look at.

I noticed that nobody has mentioned hardware maintenance and performance work. While all these skills outlined above are great to have, its also useful to have engineers to make the new technologies, and get new hardware up and running. From systems administrators installing servers and workstations, to the engineers that build the circuits, and even back to the people that put the hardware concepts together, there are a lot of areas that you can look at that require a computer somewhere down the line.

There are a ton of options. You need to identify what it is you enjoy doing. I would recommend trying out a few different things:
1. Give programming a try. Write some C or C++, see if you like it. Developer
2. Play with some scripting languages, maybe Perl or Python, maybe try and write a web application. Web Developer.
3. Try developing something for a mobile device, either for Apple or Android. Mobile Developer
4. Learn about networking, see if playing with Cisco devices and firewalls excites you, you might want to be a Network Engineer.
5. Install Linux, play around with it, maybe System Administration would be a good choice.
6. Play with databases. Mysql for example, see if you might want to become a DBA.
7. Try and hack things. Maybe security is your forte.

There are many more areas you can look into, those are just a few I thought of. Explore each one and see what you really enjoy and then go from there.