Our great sponsors
-
cs-topics
My personal curriculum covering basic CS topics. This might be useful for self-taught developers... A work in development! This might take a very long time to get finished!
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
I am also 30, don't have a degree, have a good job, and make good money.
First, and perhaps most important: there is _zero_ shame in going back to school at any age.
That said, don't derail your career for this. Career success (IMO) is a function of career momentum and you'll have a hard time getting started again if you stop now.
You have several other options:
1. Go to an online school. University of London (via Coursera), University of the People, Colorado Tech, and Western Governors' University all have CS programs that you can do online and at your own pace. They're all reasonably priced and you can likely pay out of pocket for them (especially University of the People - total cost for the degree is ~$5k).
2. Just learn stuff on your own. You're lucky to work in a field where people are very eager to share what they've been working on. You want to learn 3D graphics? Write a raytracer. Distributed systems? Implement raft. Machine learning? Follow one of a bazillion tutorials out there to get started. Then keep going. Talk to people in the field, tell them what you've been working on, and ask what to do next (think of it as a load-balanced apprenticeship). Formal education or not, nothing changes the fact that learning something thoroughly requires time, focus, and patience. It's perhaps a bit more work to learn something this way, but if you have the discipline to do it, you'll learn much more than you would in a university course (IMO).
3. Learn the material and don't worry about the degree. https://teachyourselfcs.com/, for instance, is a good resource for self study.
4. Don't worry about it! You've got a good job. You make good money. Tinker with stuff on the side and invest more time where you want to invest more time. Or don't! Learn to play the piano or something. Consider why you're constantly thinking about your lack of a degree and why it's wearing you out. Are you actually bummed out about not having a degree? Or is it that you're not fully utilizing your creativity and curiosity? The solutions to those respective problems are different and if you're looking at spending thousands of dollars on a degree, it's worth being really _really_ clear on what problem you're trying to solve.
I'd like to add that I'm highly skeptical you would learn as much while studying and holding a full time job. I knew I would learn a lot but didn't expect to learn so much.
If you want a sense of everything you'd learn from a Math bachelor's you can install Anki and download my database: https://github.com/davidgrenier/AnkiCards
Unfortunately 90% of the cards are in french.