The research

One body of research is published so far, on one corner of the subject. It asks what computing work actually pays, how people actually enter it, and which of those two questions anybody has bothered to measure.

The short answer to the last part is that almost nobody has. That finding is what shaped everything below it.

What it asked

Ten questions, put to every career it examined, and put the same way each time: where the work exists, whether it can be done remotely, how people get in, what it pays, how many people are competing, what it costs to enter, what it costs to stay, how exposed it is to automation, what else could remove it, and what employers actually screen for.

Asking the same ten questions of unlike careers is what makes them comparable. Asking them against a fixed evidence bar is what makes the comparison worth anything, and it is also what produced the register of everything the questions could not be answered about.

What it produced

• Findings — single questions settled in public, with the working shown and every figure graded
• Sources — 200 graded records, each with its date and what it cannot tell you
• Gaps — 138 questions that could not be answered at the required grade, 22 of them closeable by somebody with the right local knowledge
• Roles — 452 job titles, each mapped to the work it belongs to
• Registries — 11 governments that publish graduate earnings matched to tax records, 17 consumer regulators with power over training providers, and the countries whose law makes an employer publish what it pays
• Data — the bibliography and the gap register as CSV and JSON, CC BY 4.0, free to copy and build on
• Computing Careers 2026 — the book it produced, and the one thing here that is sold

Everything except the book is free and needs no email address. The bibliography and the gap register can be reused commercially with credit, which means the evidence can be checked and argued with by anybody who never buys anything.

What it does not cover

Stated here rather than discovered later.

Most of the world. The evidence is good for the United States, fair across Western Europe, and thins out fast after that. Several careers carry a figure for one region and nothing anywhere else. Two countries have an annex of their own and 15 more need one.

How long entry takes, for almost anything. This is the first question every beginner asks and it has no measured answer for most computing work. 35 of the 46 careers examined declare it as a gap.

Whether the method picks well. Scoring ten dimensions is an argument that it beats looking at pay alone. Nobody has followed two groups of entrants for five years to find out, this research has not run that study, and until somebody does the framework is a well-organised argument rather than a tested instrument.

That last one is the largest open question about this work, and it is published alongside the work rather than left for a reader to notice.

Sending something back

The gaps marked closeable are the cheap ones: a published source exists and nobody here has compiled it. Several of them would be a twenty-minute job for somebody who reads the right language or knows the right national portal.

If you can close one, or if a figure here is wrong, the address is on the corrections page. A correction with a publisher, a date and a locator can be acted on. One without a source is still worth sending; it just takes longer.