[tekknik]

Spending years honing skills does not mean wasting time. In fact most self studies do it out of passion, which means a lifetime of honing skills.

I have also written a compiler and my own language as well as an operating system, and its usefulness has come up exactly once in near 15 years in the industry, and that was a very niche topic. Explain why, exactly, you need to know compilers and operating systems to write any modern day app.