[flatline]

I went back in my mid-30s, with one kid. I had flirted with a variety of work/school balances up until that point, but working full time and doing school part time was going to require about 8 more years of sustained effort to finish a B.S. With a kid, full time school pretty much precluded me working, as my spouse works full time, so I ended up taking on much more debt than most undergrads, which brings up the next fundamental problem of opportunity cost. I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s. I don't regret doing it at all, I'm very glad to have finally finished the degree, but there are lots of extra costs and obstacles that come up when you have other substantial responsibilities.

That being said, the actual schoolwork was way easier in many ways than during my first foray from my 20s. I had time management skills, a supportive wife and stable home situation, and years of experience in the software industry that gave me a reasonable baseline of knowledge.

[lsc]

>I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s

Why did you decide to go back to school if your income was already that high? did you change careers? or was this just a social status/personal enrichment project?

[flatline]

Mostly the latter, though I was tired of writing business applications and looking to move into something, broadly, in the domain of scientific research. Which is not terribly straightforward with only a B.S., but seems to be pretty much impossible without one. So for the moment, I'm still on the job hunt in this area.

[haihaibye]

I dropped out of CS to work in the games industry. After that I took a financial coding job instead of going back to school, and a few years later am back at school (top 1% in the world), but as a research fellow. Everyone else doing my job has a PhD. It was extremely hard for them to hire me and they had to break the rules but they did. I'm a terrible student but a good researcher - maybe because I have what Feynman would describe as a "different box of tools"

Sure I'll never be a professor, and make decent but not top $$$, but compared to more senior people, I actually prefer what I do day to day (90% coding & research) rather than the meetings/teaching/grant writing etc that those with higher prestige jobs seem to spend their time doing.

I'm probably an outlier, and don't advise others to follow me. If I could go back in time and get the degree I would, but at the moment the opportunity cost is too high. Not just the considerable amount of money, but also the interesting new work and real world problems that I can solve now, compared to memorisation, sitting exams and redoing old problems.

[lsc]

I've worked with a bunch of folks going the other way; physics BAs who couldn't cut it as a researcher who fell back on programming.

From what I've seen, physics majors are more likely than CS majors to have a reasonable level of Linux competency.

[seanp2k2]

>" I don't regret doing it at all, I'm very glad to have finally finished the degree" What was the benefit in the end?