Every time I visit HN, I die a litlle bit inside. Should I go back to school?

4 points by nomad101 9 years ago | 3 comments

Hi, I am a 30 year old (single) developer from India, had a chronic health condition due to which I spent half 20s running from hospital to hospital, just to stay alive, not cured but stable now. Working in bodyshop building CRUD web and android apps for banks for the past five years. Folks at my office see their work just as a means to a paycheck, no pride in their work. No design discussions, no adopting new frameworks, no hackathons, no functioal programming - nothing but bare minimum. Have to literlly fight to even have a discussion on writing automated tests. Every time I visit HN and see people do and discuss intricacy of architecture, programming practices, clean code, I die a litlle bit inside. How I wish I could work in a team like that.

I am worried to death (literally cannot sleep) that I have squandered my life away. Have 2 options - take a big risk & go to US for higher education, study hard and get into a tech company. OR continue at my current workplace, put in a ton of work learning the latest and greatest on MOOCs / Udacity /Pluralsight on my own, make a github profie and and apply for jobs on 'Who's Hiring?' I am even willing to work for free for a couple of years if I can find a place in a team with good engineering practices doing something challenging, to become a better engineer.

So my question, Is it worth going back to school at 30, hoping for a better career ? Learn alogritms right this time, try to get into machine learning / AI ?

seibelj 9 years ago |

There are literally no better companies in India you can work at? Your English skills seems pretty strong, and you have the right attitude. Maybe you should try to better your situation in India before taking a huge risk, especially with your medical issues.

rashkov 9 years ago |

Just echoing what someone else already wrote: Your english is great and you have a great attitude, and you are ambitious and still young. Do not worry that you are wasting your life. It seems like you are passionate about coding, so you are in it for the long term. You should try to get a better job of course. If that means going out of the country to do it then take the chance while you're young. I don't think you need a masters degree to do that, although that may be what you want to do anyway. Best of luck to you.

ktusznio 9 years ago |

Could you become a solo freelancer and work from your current location?