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I'm working at a startup as a Rails developer. I was hired straight out of high school, which meant being underpaid, though I've spent my time improving my skills. Long story short, the job market in Silicon Valley is really hot - I now have 2 outside offers in the $110-120k range (0-0.5% equity) at early to late-stage startups, and I might be able to bid the offers up to the 130k+ range. At the same time, I'm thinking about going back to college - a non-Ivy but top CS school (think Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, UIUC). One thought I have is that we're possibly at the high point of the current tech boom and that I should take a job while the market is hot, then go back to school when there's a cooldown. There's also the fact that as a fresh CS grad, 4 years down the line, I would be making roughly the same, or maybe just slightly more, as I could make right now (100-120k). But I wonder whether going back to school after being in the industry for 2-3 years will even make sense. Ultimately, I don't know how to weigh the social and educational experience of college against starting my career 4 years early. I'm not particularly concerned that a lack of a degree itself will hold me back in the future. Any thoughts? Update: no college debt, parents thankfully have enough to pay for it. |
In my career I have done: computed cancer statistics for NIH, worked on a flight computer, done tons of avionics code, worked on a tank robot, computer vision, machine learning, and so on. Almost none of that would have been possible for me without at least a significant portion of the above skills. Chemistry comes in lowest, but it was still somewhat useful for the cancer stuff. And a tiny change in what jobs I had would have made the chemistry highly relevant (say, computational chemistry - tons of that going on around the beltway where I lived for a number of years). From here I can go most anywhere - finance quant jobs at 250K+, machine learning/big data, more computer vision, or what have you. You can .... write some more rails apps. If you are really good, sure, write the next rails, but I would say your options are far more limited than mine.
It's up to you and what you want to do, and what kind of potential you want to have available to you. University is not for learning a trade (by and large, medical school nonwithstanding); it's an opportunity to take in a lot of subjects at a depth you will never achieve on the job or part time (unless you have an ~170 IQ).
I'm sure people will post counterexamples to the above, and surely they exist; I argue simply that education == opportunity. If you have any kind of mind, 5 years of writing yet another rails app will start to bore you to tears. So, the question is, what will keep you from being bored? Inventing a new social app or such? Maybe school is less relevant. Taking on difficult intellectual challenges? It's pretty darn hard (not impossible, just very hard) to make your way without a strong math/science foundation. Also of note is how many people change their careers. Burn out in writing sw is pretty high. What skills will you have if in 5-10 years you want to be management, that CFO job starts to seem very interesting, and so on?
In short, I found my education exceptionally useful. You won't even be able to get an interview for many jobs, not because of snobbery (as is often claimed), but because there is no way you have the background to jump in and read original research in a new topic and deal with the math and algorithms in a sophisticated way. Only you can decide if that is of value to you or not.