I enjoy making things with code and usually teach myself topics I’m interested about, and certainly love working. However, as I’m still at the age where most of my friends are attending college, and I’m quickly getting nervous if my decision to dive right into industry over transferring to a 4 year college to pursue a CS degree was the right choice for me.
I only have the vague goal of working in FAANG and building a startup (having enjoyed working to the bone at a startup as a founding dev at my last job). So, I basically have no idea what I want to do in life.
How do you weigh the decision of choosing one path over the next when both seem good options? How would you decide whether to re-enter the education system, or continue working in industry?
HN has been a uniquely intriguing window into different life/career choices in tech, and was hoping if I could glean some insight from the opinions from the people here.
Thank you.
In my case, I would say set the goal of learning difficult, rare and valuable skills (IE: interested in databases? Read 3 hard books about databases) and you will be ahead of the curve. If you can't keep up, a degree might be the choice.
If you do go for the startup way, one advice I would give my old self is to keep time to learn more and enjoy time with friends and family. I spent almost one year, 365 days, 8am to 12 midnight, no Sunday breaks, programming inside a cave. I only met friends about a handful of times. Hardly came out of the house. I think I even missed a funeral. That's bad. Don't do it.
My thoughts/opinion: I absolutely love what we do. I love the seemingly endless depths of new things to learn. I worked closely with a recent 4 year CS degree grad on my team these past 2 years. I have learned so much from him it has truly made me appreciate the foundational knowledge a CS degrees provides. It's certainly not the end all be all, but I feel like it's a pretty good foundation to build your (house of cards)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31277158]
Financially, I doubt it makes sense factoring cost and time you're not working as a dev. But, if you really do enjoy learning about and writing code, and you have the time and money, I would highly encourage taking that time now for a CS degree and enjoying it!