[trchek]

I gotta say still pretty regrettable take, if you will humor I am happy to explain why I say that.

First let me say I definitely value the hundreds of hours you would have spent on hard theoretical problems and while I wasn’t exposed to your curriculum, I regret I don’t have that.

However, I myself have definitely spent a substantial number of hours on distributed algorithms that were only available as published research (didn’t have a choice and that understanding I gained has been proven out), and my extended family is filled with PhDs, so I’ve been casually reading research papers since I was in my teens, this didn’t seem weird. A lot of my peers with and without degrees didn’t engage in this practice.

To explain further, I’ve also spent I can’t even tell you how much time on benchmarking and establishing performance bottlenecks and near as I can tell, no one has in university, or at least they’re not teaching it well enough, because it is shocking how badly this part of performance is understood. Let’s call it applied practical performance enhancement of software deployments.

In the end, I just can’t fully be in board with what you’re saying. Yes I wish I had that degree nowadays and I wish I could take 4 years out and go back and do it again. But I seriously did gain a lot of valuable experience that was hard won with that extra time and near as I can tell is super duper rare, especially because people keep hiring me for it.

[wakawaka28]

It does sound like you spent your time well and learned a lot, one of the rare cases. I wonder how much of the research papers you actually understand deeply given that you lack common background knowledge. It may surprise you how many research papers are actually ill-conceived, and it is hard to see how bad they are if you don't know enough about the state of the art. You are on the right track if you want to catch up on what you would have learned in school. Just about anything in CS can be self-taught given enough time and effort, though you may need to seek feedback from others if you can't figure some things out on your own.