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Comment by MaximumYComb | Hacker News Reader

I was the 30 year old that went to night school to study a degree in Computer Science. I got my first real tech role (paying $85k) three years into my six years of study. I've just made my first job switch for a $40k payrise with six months left in my degree. I'll graduate late this year and I'll probably also be close to my next payrise which will put me at $140-150k.

I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult. My life and the life of my children are going to reap benefits from this. If you're reading this and thinking "Can I do this?" then I'd highly recommend you attempt to find a way to make it work.

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WGU is a school where you can go at your own pace, pay by the semester instead of credit hour, and test out of almost any class. Can get a full degree for like 7 grand, just a heads up.

WGU is what colleges used to be: a third party validation of knowledge mastery (along with the teaching). Many traditional universities are debt traps for teenagers.

> WGU is what colleges used to be: a third party validation of knowledge mastery

This is a pretty selective and narrow idea of what a college did or does. Most try to build knowledge before just validating it.

If you already have a bachelor's degree, then Georgia Tech's OMSCS is a good option for a CS master's. The tuition is fairly low, especially if you take multiple courses per term (about $10k to $12k, I believe) and it's basically at your own pace

My buddy got a computer science degree from a top 10 school and works at a FAANG and his experience of the GTech program has been that it is _a lot_ of work. Feels to me like it might be overkill, and perhaps too much, for someone without as much of a CS background.

Hmmm, are some FAANG roles just way less onerous than I've always imagined? My experience with OMSCS is that it's pretty straightforward if you can already build stuff, and even more so if you can write too. Without a CS background I can understand it being a challenge, but I'm surprised to hear your friend thought it was a lot to take on.

I completed the OMSCS program last year at a moderate pace (1 course per semester, except for 2 semesters where I took 2 courses). I did not avoid "hard" classes if I thought I'd learn something interesting and some of the courses are legitimately a lot of work. I think in particular Advanced Operating Systems and Compilers Theory and Practice took the heaviest toll on me. The projects for those classes were very time consuming and at a few points I was pulling 40 hours a week after my full time job to get them done.

This is my experience with OMSCS as well, although I'm only four classes in. My background is in electrical engineering and it hasn't been too challenging (yet) for me to catch up on the CS stuff (although I did take several CS courses at community colleges to help fill in some gaps before enrolling and I've been programming for over years now).

> I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult.

Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!

Unfortunately there are many companies that allow people to "fuck around all day" and excuse it as "they're still learning". I'm pretty good at being able to spot people who are genuinely trying to learn, or who are just trying to cruise through and be carried by their team. The latter do not last long if I have anything to do with it.

My field is cyber security, not development, but I feel like I get to "fuck around" with computers all day. I'm so lucky that I have a job which I enjoy so much that also rewards so well financially. I still pinch myself when I think that people actually pay me to do this for a living.

I deal with a lot of work that's really similar to puzzle solving. "Why did this occur? Is it normal behaviour or malicious?" and then I get to do deep dives trying to figure out why something happened. If I find malicious behaviour I get to go into incident response mode and boot out a bad guy. If I find a false positive I get to do some engineering to figure out how to avoid this while still maintaining the purpose of the original rules (while also minimising system overhead for the rule processing). The kicker is there are a LOT of companies willing to pay me a LOT of money to do this. I'm so incredibly lucky.

Hey maybe you're smarter than me, but it took me a lot of studying to be able to hang with the big dogs, so to speak, in software development.

Super cool: security is such a fascinating field. One of the things I love about software is that there's _so many_ interesting and different directions one can go, depending on your own interests and predilections.

Either way though, security is incredibly important. You're doin' the lord's work.

I'm interested in this field, as I relate to your mentality of finding it interesting and losing myself and sense of time trying to solve puzzles. If I wanted to go into cyber security, what would you say one should learn/do?

I also went to night school to earn a bachelor’s degree in CS. It was hard. And to compound the hardness, I started a PhD program the year I turned 30. Definitely a late bloomer. But I am now a professor of CS, and I am satisfied with the choice to follow this path. Long hours, but no boss and great pay!

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