Ask HN: Messed up my education, now 30 and regretting it. What to do?
14 by throwaway_pKmOh | 12 comments on Hacker News.
I was always a straight-A student until I came to university, where I could never seem to care about the course material or putting effort into my classes. As a result I never even finished my bachelors degree, and I'm now in my early 30s and regretting it a lot. Fortunately I was able to land a job in tech, an industry which cares a little bit less about credentials, and I've now held a number of jobs in software. I'm paid well and I think I'm pretty good at what I do. But then I look around and see the cool jobs in 3D graphics, in distributed systems, in machine learning, or other "hard computer science" fields, and it feels like I will never be qualified without a graduate degree. It really bums me out and constantly thinking about it is starting to wear me out mentally. Putting my career on hold for a few years to go back to school has a very high opportunity cost right now, and even if I were to do that I would still feel like a massive screw-up for going back to university in my 30s. At the same time, I feel like I'm throwing away my potential and my curiosity about deeper technical topics. Has anyone here been in a similar situation? What should I do?
Monday, November 15, 2021
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