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Comment by plorntus | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that makes complete sense. I don't have a degree in CS as I was self taught and actually bothered to follow online courses and read documentation. If I get sick of coding and want to move elsewhere I still have the option to go to university.

I don't see why you would want to get a degree on the off chance you wont end up liking the job and want to go into a different field.

In my situation I learned how to code at a young age, I wanted to go to university to fill in the blanks. The first semester of my computer science Ba was a course on facebook and the internet which costed 3400GBP just for that few months. Then and there I decided I wanted nothing more from this course.

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In my situation I thought I learned to code at a young age. That's a great way to phrase it too. If one (cough, OP's article) is using phrases like "learned coding [in x months]" then they have the same misunderstanding that I did when I packed up and went off to college thinking I was hot shit at 16 with 4 years of BASIC and PHP web dev under my belt. In my case it took college to expose me to a whole universe of new ideas and really get the point across that "coding" isn't a thing you can "learn" in some number of months. Given that nerdy teenagers are notoriously both cocky and stupid, I suspect that this is a common experience.

Of course there are the Peter Deutsch wunderkinds and the people who get a really good secondary education and can jump into CLRS on their own without hand holding from college, but I don't think there are very many of them out there.

And adult learners are a whole different matter for whom the decision to go to college for CS is radically different.

It's also called burn out. Often times you will spend years slaving over one program, making improvements and changes for different cases while simultaneously maintaining it, installing it, documenting it.

After years and years of this, 8 hours, 5 days a week, it gets really monotonous.

You'll thank yourself when you think maybe I can get into journalism, or HR, or accounting, or any X-degree field at a different company without even having to take more college because you already went.

There's also bad universities, you went to a bad one or you didn't continue far enough past general ed.

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