Samisp

Hello, so I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics and Finance and after bouncing around odd jobs I learned to code - long story short I am now a software engineer with 6 years of experience.

I like my job, but the more I learn the more I go into the field the more I am drawn to the theoretical side of things, especially in distributed systems. An idea was brewing in my brain of maybe going back to university and try to get a PhD, maybe even do it somehow while I'm still working. But since my BsC is old and not in CS I was wondering if it's even an option without going back. And maybe I've waited far too long

Has anyone had any experience of going back to academia to study Computer Science after some years in the industry? How were the experiences? Was it worth it? Should I just learn on my own (I don't lack the motivation, I love learning) ?

Thanks

Hello,

I'm currently working in a medium-sized AI startup (which is picking up steam). I'm currently a mid-level engineer in one of the product teams and I find myself in a bit of a search for meaning situation.

I've had a bit of an eclectic path: Degree in Economics -> Data Analyst -> Data Engineer -> Backend Engineer

As a data analyst, I got bored of making dashboards and went into data engineering since it was a growing field and, I believed, more challenging, after a while however I found myself a bit bored of making the Nth data pipeline and decided to try my hand at backend software engineering which I like a lot, but lately, I've been feeling that all I ever do is implement CRUD endpoints (data pipelines all over again) because I came in into an existing code base and there was nothing really left to do, but maintain it. I have an odd challenge here and there but life's become pretty dull, and looking at the senior devs their days are pretty much the same, except for a few more meetings.

Now my director has started asking me about what are my plans in the company and if I want to go the staff engineering route or the management route. I love engineering and would not want to take the management route, but also do not want to be making GET/POST API's for the next 15 years. Since the start of my journey into IT I've always known what the next step is and what I need to do to accomplish it (data analyst -> learn SQL, python; date engineer -> cloud, spark, kafka; backend-engineer: K8s, Go, CI/CD, DS&A, API's). But now I feel a bit stuck, I'm still reading a lot of books, but I feel like I never get to use the more advanced things I've learned.

I know that it might be a limitation of my company and I should probably try and find another position, but I am a bit afraid that going to another company would just be more of the same with a different flavored stack.

Has anyone else been in a similar position, and how did you deal with it? How did you find a way into something more interesting? Or is it just Airflow pipelines and CRUD endpoints all the way down?

Thank you