Sorry for the burner account.
I have to figure out what to do with my life right now. I really enjoy programming, and honestly, of any kind. Haven’t really found a kind of developing I dislike yet. I have been doing stuff for around 4-5 years by now, so I have confidence that I’m a good programmer, with the huge caveats that I’ve never finished any presentable project and I’ve never done anything with a team, I’ve only done solo stuff.
It seems like the logical thing to pick for a job. However, I’ve heard experiences of people with programming jobs and CS degrees that they’re absolute hell to be in. Super long work days, absurd deadlines, crunch, and that doing a CS degree means you have absolutely zero time for anything else in your life.
Having a life like that really scares me. I’m not really a strong, disciplined person. I know I can’t handle living like that. I’m scared I’ll just realize I want to quit and end up having wasted years of money and work on a degree I don’t want to use for anything - and that’s even assuming CS college isn’t that awful.
My biggest dream is doing indie game development, and it has always been that since I was a little kid, but I know that’s not a safe prospect for a reliable living wage. At the same time, abandoning that dream completely would make me feel awful. So I NEED to have time to work on my own stuff.
I wouldn’t go to a CS degree purely for more job opportunities, I’m sure there’s a lot of things I’d be able to learn in one that I need. I just don’t want to end up living just to work. I’m really only going off on rumours and experiences of other people I know though - and I don’t have much of a chance of visiting a campus or talking to professors. Because of life reasons it’d have to be abroad and I’d have to do at least the first year online.
So… yeah. I’d appreciate hearing some experiences in CS degrees and in programming jobs. Is it really that bad time-wise? Is it something enjoyable?
People are saying that their CS Degree took all their time? That’s not my experience at all. My experience is different from most as i failed out of school the first time because i was broke and had to choose between work and attending classes. Being able to feed and house myself won out. I went back to school at age 29 years old to get my degree, though.
I was a full time student, managed to schedule my classes to fall largely on 3 days a week, was able to attend most of the lectures remotely, had a job the entire time, and used the weekends to get all my homework done. It takes time, but I still played video games sometimes, went to the movies, had time with my wife and family, etc.
Now the bigger question is the value of a CS degree for you. I agree that you’ll likely learn some new things you don’t pick up from just learning to code on your own. But what of that is truly practical to your ambitions to independently develop games is probably minimal, if it matters at all. It’s not only a big time sink, but a money sink. If you’re not going to use the degree for employment, and the theory and math you’d learn in for you degree isn’t going to apply to what you want to do, I’d not recommend the investment.
If anything, spend a few weeks is a coding bootcamp, save years of your time and thousands of your dollars, and they’ll cover your bases on what you need to know for practical programming. I’m a data engineer and many of my peers have unrelated degrees but just went through a boot camp to learn to code. But honestly, if you’ve been coding projects for 5 years, I doubt they’re going to teach you anything profoundly new either. Neither a degree nor a boot camp ever teaches you everything you need for any given job or project anyway. There’s always going to be more to learn as you do. When it comes to programming, experience, practice and willingness to learn are the most valuable things to have. Just make sure you learn and follow best practices and internalize some software engineering principles. They will save you time and effort in the long run.
Edit: Also, the amount of pressure and crunch you experience will differ from employer to employer. But my job is pretty chill. I am not expected to work more than 40 hours a week and usually do not unless I’m on a support rotation which I am 3 weeks out of the year. I have more than 5 weeks off a year between holidays, pto, sick leave, and vacation. And my job is hybrid (formerly all remote, but that’s unfortunately getting rarer), so I get to work from home 3 days a week. It’s not bad at all.