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by lsc 4770 days ago
>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?
1 comments
flatline 4770 days ago
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.
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haihaibye 4770 days ago
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.

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lsc 4770 days ago
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.

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