Ask HN: Your thoughts on returning to college to “refresh” a career?
Multiple years is a lot of opportunity cost, and while it is probably tough to get a sci programming aerospace job without at least a CS degree, (a) you might not manage to land a job in such a narrow specialty, and (b) even if you do, you might not earn back the lost wage, especially because you&#x27;ll be sort of tacitly acknowledging an EXP &quot;reset&quot; and starting from a lower salary rank.<p>These are obstacles you can overcome if you have a lot of career and negotiation savvy. But the Venn diagram of programmers with that kind of savvy is not encouraging, so you may want to do some personal reflection before investing.<p>The good news is that if you want to get away from piecework web grunt stuff, you don&#x27;t need a degree (or even any formal education) to do that. If you apply yourself as seriously as you&#x27;d have to in school to practicing serious development, on personal projects, in specialized areas that are interesting to you, have some job market applicability, and involve more hardcore programming, you should be able to get yourself to a place where you can start interviewing for serious dev jobs.