[tasuki]

> One of the tragedies of being young is that few have the insight to realize that the 'boring' stuff parents and teachers are forcing us to learn will actually benefit us and that eventually we'll be very thankful that they did.

I'm 40. I don't know, perhaps I'm still young.

I did not appreciate having to learn the boring parts. Learning things for the next exam so as to forget them in two weeks... I didn't see the point then and still don't.

I managed to get by with the minimum possible, fluked my CS education, then had a career earning an order of magnitude more than the average salary. Shrug.

Maybe I'm missing something else because of my lack of education? I don't know...

[throwaway31131]

We’re all going to have different paths but I’m certain that flunking CS education and then getting 10x the average salary is not going to be the common case and was probably only possible for a given point in time.

I’m in my late 40s. I left grad school to get a job in VLSI because it was possible to do so in the job market of the 90s. In today’s job market we wouldn’t even pickup the resume of a new college graduate that didn’t have at least a masters. I would’ve been totally passed by today.

Assuming the benefit we’re looking is getting a high paying job of course.

[ThrowawayR2]

You (and I and many others on HN) were lucky enough to join the tech industry while it was still growing explosively and got outsized salaries because of it. If you were to do the same thing today, you'd be telling a very different and much grimmer tale.

[hilbert42]

"…perhaps I'm still young."

Possibly so, wisdom often take years to gel and often only after life events force its notions to the fore.

[tasuki]

I had way more than usual share of "life events". I threw my career out the window to care for my toddler and dying partner. Then my partner died and I'm left alone raising the kid. What else is going to happen to make me wiser?