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I'm a teenage highschool dropout. I got my first computer in 1983, and my last year of highschool was 1988. In the 5 years between those two events, I managed to make myself more money writing code than my parents were making in the real estate market .. and I've never looked back. I've been lucky to be able to say that I grew up with the computer industry, and have always been able to - somehow - stay on the bleeding edge of computerization as its occurred over the decades. That said, I must admit that the idea of returning to education at some point does arise now and then. I'd love to be able to do it now, in my 40's, when I think its really worthwhile - with what I have under my belt in terms of industrial experience, I think I'd have a lot more fun at school than I would have in the 80's - when the closest thing I could get to a CompSci course back then would have had me using technologies that were already outdated by then, and which wouldn't have taught me anything I wasn't already learning in my non-school hours, hacking away. Its been a long, hard slog though. I have to tell you that if you decide to go the industrial route over education, be prepared to work hard. Harder than you would work at school, that is for sure - and also, be prepared for the responsibility of having to learn new things, yourself, in an industrial setting, without much hand-holding. I was fortunate enough to have had the right kinds of guru's over the years, as an apprentice working with masters you do get a lot of benefits that school does not provide. Maybe when I hit 50, I'll go back to school .. mostly so I can contribute, somehow, to the educational scene, and maybe also so that I can write a few of those papers that have been backlogging in my mind over the decades .. |
Maybe its better in the 10s.
I did the night school / online thing nearly a decade ago after having been in the field a little longer than yourself. What I enjoyed the most was variety. Some schools don't have many electives, avoid those.
I got an associates degree when I initially got started. 99% of hiring managers consider that toilet paper if not used toilet paper. That's "OK" because after your first real job no one cares about degrees anymore. It just makes the initial job search, pure hell. The only difference between an associates and a bachelors is about 32 credits of liberal arts, lots of math, and some random stuff (public speaking, survey of engineering, business 101, that kind of thing). I was kind of pissed off at not getting transfer credit for my FORTRAN and COBOL classes, I got to take some intro to programming C++ classes in the early 00s, that was, um, interesting, it was very easy but still very time consuming.
Liberal arts are wasted on the youth. For example I hated history class in 8th grade, absolutely loved college level history when I was about 3x that age. Lit classes were awesome. You'll hear a lot of 19 year olds on the HN echo chamber mode telling each other that liberal arts classes are a waste of time, that kind of talk goes away once (or if?) they age and get some wisdom.