Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?
I graduated from a programming bootcamp about 6 years ago. I decided to go into full CS degree but my bootcamp instructors said to me &quot;it is a waste of time and will cost you a lot of opportunity cost&quot;.<p>A lot of my friends from that bootcamp without CS degree already have good careers as engineering managers, senior staff software engineers at startups, or regular engineers (around junior and mid level) at Facebook&#x2F;Google, some of them are content enough and stop improving, some of them are still improving. Meanwhile I still failed the interviews. (For some reason I have a history with many rejections. I got rejections 9 times from programming bootcamps and admitted into one, that changed my life. I also got rejected twice from a programming bootcamp that was known for &quot;anyone can get in&quot;).<p>I didn&#x27;t regret a thing. I&#x27;m glad I studied CS. (Disclaimer: I had 2 other unrelated degrees: Industrial Engineering and Biblical Theology, this is my 3rd career change). For now, even though I already graduated and worked at a decent paying job, I just started to revisit compiler and want to study all in about it.<p>In my opinion, tech field moves really fast, even a hardcore techies will have hard time and regularly experienced burnouts due to the fast nature of the field (cough cough, frontend dev and devops). But as long as you have passion, you can still be the last persons standing. It will last you a long time. I think people with passions will go above and beyond of what is expected from the regular job to practice his&#x2F;her craft, and the world can&#x27;t get enough of people like that.<p>As long as it is fun, would you mind? I don&#x27;t mind. If CS pay only half of what it pays right now, I would still do it.