Group Rationality Diary, January 16-31

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: January 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: January 1-15

Rationality diaries archive

I'm planning on switching careers. Currently, I do IT support (desktop administration) and have a pretty nice job. I'd like to move into programming for the increase in flexibility and salary, as well as long-term job stability -- I'm pretty sure my current career will be automated away well before I'm capable of financial independence. To further that end, I'm fairly close to finishing my BS, and changing majors to Computer Science would greatly aid my transition.

Current options:

Quit the job and go back to school full time. I'll have enough money saved to do this in December 2014, and will graduate in May 2016. I'll need to take on about $15,000 of student loan debt to accomplish this, and I'll be without an income during that period, so this represents a big hit to my finances justified by a much better paying job.
Go to school part time while working. One free class per semester is a benefit of my job, and I'll graduate in August 2019. This puts off my ability to get a programming job for quite some time, but it avoids any student loan debt, and it allows me to keep my income.

The first option will break even financially with the second option if my beginning programming job pays $60k and I get one immediately after graduation. Both of these conditions seem unlikely, so I'm inclined to think that staying in my job and getting the computer science degree slowly is a better choice. However, I imagine that there are benefits to getting into the programmer career sooner rather than later, though I'm unable to quantify these and am not sure how to incorporate them into my decision making.

Thoughts?

This website seems to suggest that the average CS major makes about $58k for a starting salary. So, if you do reasonably well in school, then getting a $60k starting salary doesn't seem unlikely.

Why do you think getting a job right after graduation is unlikely? Can you find out from the school how likely it is for a CS major to get a job right after graduation? If the probability of getting a job right after school is low, then can you consider attending a different school?

Also, programming competency can be signaled without a degree: contribute to open s... (read more)

1Shmi12y

Is getting a job in programming really contingent on your getting the degree, or rather on you being capable of doing the job?