Ask HN: Affordable, online university for getting a degree to quit programming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Affordable, online university for getting a degree to quit programming?

77 pointsthrowaway-3268 comments

I'm a 32 years old self-taught programmer who has a strong resume and impressing experience, found jobs all over the world until today easily. But; I don't enjoy building software anymore. I do it just for bringing home money, I got one kid to take care of.

I enjoy reading books and learning a lot, so wouldn't mind working hard to start something new from scratch.

Getting a degree in Business is an option in my mind. I wonder if that would be a multiplier on top of my programming experience. I'm open for suggestions for studying something else, would be open to hear some ideas.

I found out that Arizona State University has a remote program, but it costs about 30k. I can't afford that. It's way above my budget.

Do you know any universities that has an affordable bachelors degree program ?

I live in Europe but it can be everywhere in the world. It'd be great if it's in US, so I can also improve my English along the way :)

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I think you may benefit from thinking more concretely about what you want to do. It is one thing to say "not-programming" - which is very broad, so broad that it is not terribly helpful - and quite another to say "I'd like to make a living as a jazz musician" or "a biology researcher" or any number of other things. Start there: what do you want to run towards, rather than what you are running away from.

Second, there are many possible career paths which are adjacent to programming, and which would use your technical skills, but not as part of your day-to-day. This could be project management, product management, technical writing, or even engineering people management. As before, if you have an idea of a specific function in your organization that you would find interesting, and which would make use of your talents as a programmer, then this may be an easier route than starting from scratch.

When it comes to any of these functions, my advice would be to: (1) Find small ways to demonstrate your interest in aptitude for those skills. For example, work with your product manager to write a product brief ("Hey, can I take a crack at it and ask for your feedback? I'd love to learn how to do this kind of thing.") And, (2) if you are able, express to your current manager that you'd be interested in learning additional skills and possibly making a - deliberate, smooth - career transition.

If you pursue a degree - be it in business, or any other field - realize that you would likely be competing for jobs with others who have 10 years of experience in the field, rather than new college hires. This is not an impossible thing! But this does require a strong narrative, and your ability to articulate why you made a career change and what specifically you can offer based on your previous work experience in the unrelated field.

My overall point would be to really take some time to sketch out what you would want to do (in the affirmative), why it is interesting to you, and how specifically (not in a hand-wavy sense, but "here is a specific task that I could do more effectively and here is why") your current skills would have a multiplier effect on your new path.

Best of luck to you!

"(2) if you are able, express to your current manager that you'd be interested in learning additional skills and possibly making a - deliberate, smooth - career transition."

Based on my experience, that is unlikely to work. If you are not in an entry-level job, then your employer/supervisor, if reasonably intelligent and competent, will recognize that you're far more valuable doing what you've always done. So they may be nice to you, but they will resist. It's the flip side of the Peter Principle.

I think it's a better approach to get an entry-level job in the field/organization you want to transition to and then expand your job with the stuff you want to be doing.

Not necessarily. I would argue that any reasonable intelligent and competent employer/supervisor would recognize that an unhappy employee is going to provide diminishing returns over time, and the employer would be better served helping them explore related opportunities in the company. I've seen programs to help employees do exactly this at every place I've worked.

The only cases where I think it would usually be a problem are if your end goal is not with the company, or if the end result is seen as a going down the ladder (example: QA personnel moving into development is a positive move, but developers becoming a tester is often seen as a negative move)

>quite another to say "I'd like to make a living as a jazz musician"

Yes, quite another. Not recommended. (Source: I'm a jazz musician.) The musician part is wonderful, the make a living part, not so much. Jazz musicians mostly teach to make a living. Well, there are much worse ways to make a living than teaching people what you know about.

Haha, I used that example because I myself aspire to become a better jazz musician. I play the saxophone and, shameless plug, sell notebooks (themusiciansnotebook.com)

I've came from almost the exact opposite, got a degree in something else and taught myself programming and made programming my career. In my limited experience, programming is the field where you're almost certain to deal with people with above-average logical reasoning skills and who are generally good natured. Same can't be said for other fields, there are definitely great minds in other fields, but there are almost no bound to the bad apples and you might end up dealing with those people much more regularly [In addition to not working in something as interesting as programming, but that probably only applies to me and not you]. Something to think about.

I came here to say basically the same thing, as my story is very similar.

One big thing to consider, which I wish I had known before college:

It’s best to go get some relevant work experience before you undertake a degree program. This is true for several reasons:

1. You find out if you even want this particular kind of job, and assuming you do, you should have a better idea what sort of specialization / direction you are interested in.

2. You need to learn what to learn before you’re in school. Industry people can give you good insight into what coursework and topics are more valuable and what is not worth your time. They can also help point you to the best learning opportunities / schools.

In my own academic experience, I did alright, but I found that when I finally emerged into the workforce many of my ideas about what I needed to know were false, and that I had missed out on material that would have really benefitted me.

In most fields the academics are barely or not at all connected to the industry, so they often can’t help you with the “vocational” aspect of your education very much.

Yeah I tried to quit programming to join the food industry once. It was incredibly depressing, and a huge bump to the number of sleazy people I had to deal with. Think sexism in tech is bad? My wife worked on construction sites, where sexual harassment and corruption were rampant.

I went through a potentially similar experience as you, where I was feeling a bit burned out on writing software. There were other things I wanted to pursue like writing fiction, but I didn't necessarily have the budget to focus on it full-time.

I transitioned into working in a field that still leverages my technical skills, but in a different way -- I conduct technical interviews. It's been a really healthy change for me in a number of ways -- in addition to getting some face-to-face communication with real human beings & improving my interviewing/interpersonal skills, it's also given me the chance to work remotely and pursue the other things that interest me. And I've found it to be a huge relief to have a job that is separate from the stress of maintaining a codebase or crafting software all day which I found to be pretty draining.

The company I work for in this space pays well ($100 USD per 90-minute interview). If this is the kind of thing you (or anyone else reading this) might be interested in, send me an email and I would be happy to talk further about it! My email address is in my profile.

Tell me more about your job. Is that an hour interview plus half an hour to write it up? How many interviews do you get in a week? Suppose you did three a day 5 days a week, which would be $1350 a week. Not bad for a work from home job with that amount of time.

Edit $1500 a week, not 1350.

Yep, that's correct -- 60 minute interview and 30 minute writeup summarizing & scoring the interview. There is actually a surprising amount of work in this space, at least at the company I'm working for -- I usually try to do a maximum of 10 interviews a week to leave time for my game development pursuits, but there are lots of other folks who do more than that & use it as a full time job.

The type of interviewing I'm involved in is mostly first-round technical screens -- the standard interview format is about 10-15 minutes discussing the candidate's prior work and the remainder of the time on a live coding exercise.

It's a lot of fun -- I always enjoyed solving & working on "interview-style" problems more than the actual enterprise software projects I'd build at work. So it's definitely been a game-changer to discover this field.

Some other ideas along these lines:

technical recruiter, project manager, and jobs selling or teaching technology

Finding people in these fields who actually understand the technology they're dealing with is pretty rare and usually very appreciated by the people you wind up working with, so you'd have a big advantage.

I'm surprised by the low rate for interview work. Interviews always wiped me out.

But I guess the interviewers get a lot of freedom and maybe get it's gets easier the more you do it.

It was challenging at first but you are definitely right that once you do it consistently for (maybe a month or so), it becomes a lot less taxing.

And yes -- a big part of the appeal is definitely the flexibility in terms of hours & location. It's been such an improvement to my quality of life to find a fully remote job.

I never studied business, but did spend a couple years as a product manager working with MBAs, and what I was told --- this could definitely be wrong --- about business degrees and, more importantly, business school is that most of the value was in physically attending and networking, and that you generally wanted to be in one of the top programs or not do it at all.

On the other hand, I have heard from other people that accounting classes are super valuable.

I agree with that sentiment but it is important to recognize that it is largely a class divide

People that go to US non-Ivy League non-Stanford MBA’s have a very different opinion. I’m glad they’ve found/rationalized utility in their choice but as someone that has once hit a glass ceiling, I’ll pass and bet on winners.

If you want an idea of just how many doors your MBA will open, just look at the size of their career center. I'd it's staffed by a part time college intern, your MBA won't open the front door to your front even if you hand it the keys. I'd they're pretty big and matched up with a whole bunch of alumni, they are future donors after all, then that network everyone talks about building in school is something you can maybe tap into.

My CIS degree was basically business management with 2 programming 101 classes, each in a different language.

Micro and Macroeconomics were fascinating to me. They might be useful to someone but I don't run a business so I can't comment on that.

Accounting was pretty rigorous and I could easily see that being useful, if nothing else just for the ability to gain insight into the process and an appreciation for how complex it is.

Every other class about things like communication, leadership, managing people, and project management just seemed like common sense.

I went to an online school so I missed out on the networking. I could easily see that being the most valuable part or potentially the only useful part of a business degree. If I were OP I'd read a couple books instead.

Before radically changing your career can you remember why you got into software development in the first place? Was it something beyond mere utility? Many of us got into software because we were fascinated with how computers work and wanted to divine the depths of that mystery. Perhaps you can rediscover that and find more lasting fulfillment. This might lead you to a place you hadn't considered. For instance perhaps a specialization of software engineering like data engineering, crypto, quantum computing etc all might reignite that excitement for you. Good luck!

Check out Western Governors University.

https://www.wgu.edu/

It is surprisingly affordable, and you can get as much out of it as effort you put in. It is also a fully-accredited institution.

WGU is a interesting set up- they are very fully online and you can consume course work at your own pace, and that pace can be very rapid indeed. I have a colleague who completed the entire MBA program in under 100 days. A WGU degree isn't going to open up too many doors for got by itself, but if you are just looking to learn a subject its a good option.

WGU graduate here, I received my Bachelor of Science in Information Technology last year, averaging 24 credits per term. WGU has been good for the credential and for seriously strengthening my ability to self-learn, but it hasn't been terribly good for my career. Networking is seriously important and the industry, and it is nearly impossible to do within WGU.

a fresh business degree at 35-37 yo is a complete waste of time. a business degree already has minimal value at 21 yo.

find what you’d like to do, and start doing it. someone somewhere is going to let you in as an apprentice or intern or similar. connections really help here — friends or folks from activities you do — but imho you just need to get started. anything will do, it’s just the first step on the road. so don’t be picky.

ok even if you disagree with that, no a fresh business degree is not a multiplier for CS experience.

A degree is a hard requirement on many, many jobs. Your resume will never be seen by human eyes without it. What do you recommend people with bills and families do, to address this reality?

Find jobs where the degree is not a hard requirement. However many may require one, I've never had trouble finding employment without one.

If you're targeting a specific employer known to have that policy, then yeah, you're SOL, but there's huge demand for smart, capable people out there. I know a lot of guys who got spurned during an interview process when someone found out they didn't have a degree, and they wear that as a chip on their shoulder, using it to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars along with 2+ years of evenings on night school, when they could just say "Well, bummer, guess it's not going to work out" and move on.

For some people getting a degree is the right choice and opens the right doors. Just make sure that you're one of those people before a few frustrating experiences are allowed to dictate the next 5 years of your life.

I have to agree somewhat with this. Unless you doing very specific business degree, such as accounting, in which you do really well, an you have talked to potential employers first who have some decent prospect of hiring you after you are done.

Do you know good programmers in your country, know how to run sprints and could lead a team that people can outsource to? Take a couple free MOOCs on the managerial side software development.

Given you taught yourself programming, you'll probably find you can teach yourself your next skill too. Three common next careers for once-software developers are recruitment (kill me now), engineering management (makes sense) and developer relations (fascinating if you have a knack for storytelling). In my MBA I'm sue I did learn things that I otherwise would not have eventually taught myself. But not because they could not be self-taught. Just because I wouldn't have thought to have included them in my never-ending program of self-education.

How about you try to transition to being a product manager? Lot’s of MBAs become product managers, but I know at least at my company, SWEs have switched over to becoming PMs. What they do is pretty different depending on what company you’re working for or where you are in the company, but it definitely keeps you tied in to the core metrics of the organization and frequently working with upper management. They often earn more than engineers too.

I have to second this suggestion. School is great and if you want to go back to school then I don't want to stop you. However, if it's a means to an end, then when you are in your thirties with a kid I'm not sure it's going to pay back. "I'm a programmer that wants to be a PM/PGM" is a great way to get into business without having to pay upfront. Certain kinds of dev management will get you there too. If you don't mind doing dev for a couple more years, you can try moving to a big company and climb the "greasy ladder" for a while -- Get a lead dev position, move into a dev manager position and then start working your way up to executive level. To be honest, experience is going to pay much better than education in these kinds of scenarios anyway.

> I got one kid to take care of.

> it costs about 30k. I can't afford that

It sounds like income and savings are your limiting factors. A few years back I was in similar position, except I was trying to get into software.

Some lessons I learned:

- getting a degree in business didn't really prepare me for anything targeted enough that it opened any real job opportunities for me

- a big reason I went into software is because I liked coding on the side, there was evidence I could get a job as a self taught developer, demand for seemingly capable devs was high, and starting pay was pretty good

- finding opportunities that paid enough for me to consider, and where I could make it through the interview process, was extremely difficult, and honestly pretty disheartening

- it took me two years of full time studying to get my first coding gig, a 1 year contract, and I had to be willing to move 4000km at my own expense to get it

What I encourage you to do is some research on careers that pay well enough starting out that you can make a switch AND you can teach yourself. If you really want to go back to school, I highly encourage you to pick program/degree that prepares you for something that is predictably needed: accounting, welding, paralegal, something like that. And when you graduate, be prepared to take a shit job that no one else wants to get the experience you need, as you may not have any better options.

Also, remember that getting out of software means your skills start to rot, which means if you decide to go back to coding, plan on that being harder than you expect it to be.

Since you already know how to build software, why not learn how to break them?

Go into infosec and make bank. Less tedious than coding and better pay in my experience.

How is infosec less tedious?

Have you considered something more manual? Warehouse or driving is an easy option that let's you earn a little cash, while clearing your head.

+1 this. For me, even playing with LEGO bricks with my kid helps me to `reset` from programming.

> It can be everywhere in the world

German universities offer Batchelors and Masters programs almost for free - literally just a few hundred Euros per semester.

The language barrier obviously might be an issue. I know it's certainly possible (common, even) to take Masters programs offered completely in English, so I would assume English language Batchelors programs are also available, though might be harder to find.

As a German, I can second this. There are quite a few people who start studying with 32. You will have a Bachelor with 35 and a master with 37. That's fine enough. And basically there is nothing which prevents you from working next to studying.

I strongly recommend to study at a "presence" university, not remote. It is way easier to keep on the ball and to talk with peers.

I'll research that. Thanks. I hope I can find English speaking school, if not, happy to study German for a while.

Just look for universities where undergraduate lectures are hold in English. I guess there are some where English is dominating starting from the third semester.

The language barrier is becoming less and less of an issue (for English speakers).

> Universities in the United States should watch out. It won’t be long before Americans realize that top European schools offer a fast-growing number of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taught entirely in English, for a fraction of the price of many American schools, even if you add on overseas airfare. (In 2009, there were about 55 English B.A.’s offered in Continental Europe; by 2017, there were 2,900.) - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/opinion/sunday/europeans-...

https://www.studyportals.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/EAIE...

That's encouraging, could there ever be enough pressure to lower prices here?

Maybe you should just change the type of the software you build. If you are writing business software I completely understand you. At some point I was also considering to keep programming as a hobby and to start a new career in some other field. However, in the end I realized that I will throw away a good salary and already organized life without even having a clear alternative path. Software development is always a fun if you have a good team that loves software and management that understands the importance of software. So, my suggestion is to find a different industry for which you will write software and to find a company that takes the software development seriously. Whatever path you take, good luck :)

Sometimes people do get way too deep in something that in the abstract sounds like a good new direction for their life, but it really isn't, and then they're stuck. I remember in another forum I read years ago, an IT guy who decided to become a nurse. He had a very difficult time finding employment, and ended up working in a prison, which was extremely difficult and demoralizing.

The question is, what do you really want? I realized, after a long time, that what I really want and am willing to sacrifice other things for, is to work directly with the person that ultimately gets value from my work product. Which is not how things work for developers and programmers in most places.

Thomas Edison State University has a degree in General Management that you can complete for less than 10K entirely online. You can check out a sample plan on Degree Forum: https://www.degreeforum.net/mybb/Thread-Cheapest-General-Man.... Also look at Degree Forum Wiki https://degreeforum.miraheze.org/wiki/Degree_Forum_Wiki.

My main advice is to try to focus on a role or category of role and speak to actual people with that job and who hire for that job. What you are after are practical suggestions about getting from where you are to where you want to be. It's possible - but also not extremely likely - that an additional degree is worth the effort and expense. But don't sell your current knowledge and experience short - and for goodness sake do not throw it away. Leverage it and be the programmer who now does 'x', bringing all of what made you a great programmer to the table.

California Virtual Campus allows you to search for online classes and other info for all California colleges.

https://cvc.edu/

ASSIST helps you figure out what classes transfer within the California system.

https://assist.org/

It's possible to test out of some classes. CLEP is not the only means to do so, but is on the big names in this space.

https://clep.collegeboard.org/exams

I'm late to the party, but I'd have thought there were lots of related fields which your resume would work for without the degree that might not involve the bits you don't like about programming (e.g. product management, dev team management, marketing and as others have suggested tech recruitment)

OnlineU does a good job of tracking affordable college degrees. You'll have to go check on degrees that are offered yourself. Georgia, Kansas and New Mexico have accredited state colleges with pretty low tuition.

https://www.onlineu.org/most-affordable-colleges

Make sure the college is regionally accredited and non-profit. Good luck!

Open University is £9K a year, though I'm not sure what changes if you're not British. They've been doing distance learning for decades.

You mentioned you were looking to start your own business. You don't need a degree in business (or permission) to pursue this. You will learn a lot more by doing a side hustle and succeeding/failing with that than learning from case studies in a classroom.

Since you already know how to build things, you're already well-positioned for this. All you need to know now is to learn how to sell. Good luck!

A few questions that might help people answer better:

1. Where do you currently live?

2. What country/countries do you have citizenship for?

3. Do you have the equivalent of (what we would call in the US/Canada) a high school diploma?

4. Do you have any sort of degree or academic certificate already? If so, in what?

5. What is your interest in business specifically? Are you interested in startups, or getting into management at a large corporation?

I got a 3rd world citizenship, it's useless and have high-school diploma.

I'm interested in business because I want to build my own business with all the learnings from the study, and can also fallback to a management in corp. if things don't work out.

> wouldn't mind working hard to start something new from scratch.

Look for Problems to Solve. Problems are Goldmines. >https://www.diamandis.com/blog/problems-are-goldmines

There are tons of blue collar jobs that pay very well. You can also get a technical degree in less time than a MBA.

Look into aircraft mechanics, tons of jobs needed for power company's ranging from engineering to to service technicians. Even in the right markets plumbing and electrical engineers making a killing.

I have more and more friends going into these fields, and they seem great for someone who wants a long term stable uncomplicated career. But—and not as an attempt to open an argument—I find that my own diminishing lack of desire to build software increases as it feels more like an assembly line and less like the OP describes. I don't characterize all blue collar jobs this way, but particularly aircraft parts assembly and some aspects of mechanics, though I'd imagine mechanics would really help get back to a place of solving problems. Be curious what you think of that.

One career path I've always wanted to do is sales engineer. It's very much in demand. They have to hire people who have very high technical skills, but don't often want to do sales. You probably don't need an extra degree for it; the sales is the easy part to train.

Go get a PMP or Prince2 and become a project manager in any software company. Problem solved.

How do you feel about a customer facing tech role? Something like Customer Success or a Solutions Architect in a B2B SaaS company. You're close to code, might write some,but it's a relatively minor component of your day to day.

I think this is a great idea. I would also offer in addition something like Technical Trainer or Developer Advocate, although with a youngster the travel could be seen as problematic. With a Technical Writer position you could do some code, work from home and write. All while leveraging existing skills which I think is important to do.

It's very difficult to find anything similar to programming compensation-wise or job availability. Probably the closest one is to become a nurse, counselor, therapist that type of thing. But that would take years of training and $$$ as well.

In that case, a study that can be multiplier to my programming experience can be a good option. For example, business management ?

I'm not sure there's a lot of multiplier on top of software engineering which isn't a more specialized version of it like network or ML.

The only one I can think of is an entrepreneurial business degree and then you starting your own software business.

This is kind of a vague question.

Do you want to leave programming and would not consider anything technical and related? E.g. Cyber security, applied mathematics, etc?

You could always try openuniversity.edu

Look at scholarships available to non traditional scholarships. Never pay sticker price on education

why you already hold the success key and want to drop it? Quit programming? Are you serious? Do u even know how many people in this world want to squish into the programming world everyday?

build stuff. the current education system is overrated, especially 'business'

Wgu.edu

WGU?

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