Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

It's not entirely clear that much of this field will look the same in five years, but still, I think doing the thinking and the planning for the sake of mapping out the route is important.

If only to inform you that no, you don't want any of those routes.

(I did this planning and ended up in academia/microbiology, as a product designer, for better or worse but it's been fun)

My wife asks me from time to time: "What do you need to learn now for the next five years of your career?"

It's a great question. It is also, I think, the right time frame, though one could argue for three years instead of five. Given the terrain I see now, I can plan for the next five years, and have those plans be mostly reasonable most of the time. Past that is harder.