Either a Site Reliability Engineer (SW-SRE/SA-SRE), startup founder or farmer. ;) (It's also true: farmers often do welding, machining, industrial maintenance (hydraulic/electrical/mechanical), surveying, geology, botany, chemistry, accounting, marketing and more.)
Work is real experience, don't discount it. :thumbs up emoji here:
If you're worried about knowledge gaps, here's a badass career development project -> self-pace audit a quality CS degree:
- Find the required course list for a particular university, let's say MIT or CalTech.
- Select a sequence of courses based on their requirements.
- Go through each and every course syllabus and textbook to learn the big ideas.
- Write and keep notes in your own words to summarize each concept.
- If you get stuck on any concept, scour the internet, MOOCs and youtube until you get it. As a last resort, SO/HN/Reddit.
- Do the syllabus homework at a minimum.
PS: I was self-taught (Pascal, assembly, C89, C++, and Java), built beige PCs, was an assistant manager at a software store (Egghead), and had a sysadmin consulting company installed an ISDN modem, made NIX and Windows place nice and helped port a BWR/PWR simulator from NIX to Win32 before I was 18. Then I spent 10 years, money and took on some debt to get a degree that ultimately proved worthless trying to appease HR people and family... don't do that.
Work is real experience, don't discount it. :thumbs up emoji here:
If you're worried about knowledge gaps, here's a badass career development project -> self-pace audit a quality CS degree:
- Find the required course list for a particular university, let's say MIT or CalTech.
http://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/computer-science-engine...
http://cms.caltech.edu/academics/ugrad_cs
- Select a sequence of courses based on their requirements.
- Go through each and every course syllabus and textbook to learn the big ideas.
- Write and keep notes in your own words to summarize each concept.
- If you get stuck on any concept, scour the internet, MOOCs and youtube until you get it. As a last resort, SO/HN/Reddit.
- Do the syllabus homework at a minimum.
PS: I was self-taught (Pascal, assembly, C89, C++, and Java), built beige PCs, was an assistant manager at a software store (Egghead), and had a sysadmin consulting company installed an ISDN modem, made NIX and Windows place nice and helped port a BWR/PWR simulator from NIX to Win32 before I was 18. Then I spent 10 years, money and took on some debt to get a degree that ultimately proved worthless trying to appease HR people and family... don't do that.