Once again, thank you so much. It means a lot coming from someone in the industry, who’s walked a similar path.

I have been making some moves. I am evaluating, but I don’t want to get stuck in analysis paralysis. I’m in the “what happens if my situation changes” stage, and right now, I still think having a degree will be a benefit.

First of all, I can’t thank you enough for the thoughtful reply. Your experience in the first half of your reply is very valuable, and what I am hoping for in my journey.

I’m not sure this place you’re imagining exists the way you’re describing.…

I agree, it might not, but in my career, as I’ve advanced higher, I have found a new landscape to explore each time. I didn’t even get in to managing a team on purpose, I was the lead engineer on my team and my boss quit. I had no eye on the position, until the rest of my team got behind me and told both me and the company that they wanted me as their leader. It was then that I took stock of where I was going in my career and after doing that for a little while, I knew the direction I wanted to go. Despite my role turning from the day to day technical, to a more long term thinking type role, I found I enjoyed it greatly. I was able to re-shape the team to be more effective, and I made some tremendous improvements in our tech stack. Most of it didn’t come from me, it was things my team brought to me, and we worked to turn into proposals, with financial metrics and so forth. This was also where I got my first taste of Architecture, being put on the CAB, in charge of evaluating all the infrastructure requests and designs.

At the time I was sure it was the architecture and planning I enjoyed, so I accepted a position as an Architect with another company. In the end though, I realized that it wasn’t the technical work I enjoyed, it was mentoring and building a team. It felt great to be the guy who could help take the ideas that the team had, and build them into a workable business solution. I even enjoyed bringing my engineers back down to ground level; sometimes a really good idea, just isn’t workable in the current landscape. I wound up walking away from that job amicably to deal with some family health issues and now I’m stuck back in a Senior Engineer role, slowly dying of boredom.

As you get higher into management, firing people absolutely sucks. Keeping on dead weight/underperformers/overstaff instead of firing them means you are robbing your ability to give raises or advancement to the other workers you have that are really performing well. So you fire them, but it still sucks.

Wholeheartedly agree, but I’ve also done this long enough, and seen enough of the type who need to go, that I am willing to act. I have not directly fired anyone, but I have been on the hiring, managing and I have had to develop performance review practices for the engineer that I wanted to fire, but did not have the authority to do so (was a good lesson, he eventually turned around, just after far more strikes than most places would tolerate).

I don’t say any of this to discourage you. This has just been my experience. Perhaps you’ll navigate the river differently and find what you’re looking for when you advance. But seriously, you can totally get a Bachelors degree, and you don’t even need to quit your current job.

Again, thank you so much for your input. I know a degree won’t fix every problem, but at this point, working on new ones is what I’m after. I’d change careers entirely but I don’t think I have the time, so instead I want to advance and see where it takes me.

I’m in the evaluation stage, trying to make sure I can stick to it if I embark on this journey. Discussions like this help a great deal.

I’m aware, but I am not built for that. Plus, I’m so established as someone without one in the industry that such deception would be instantly discovered.

The Wright Brothers did not know everything about flying, physics, engines, etc. They knew enough to do it, and did. In the years since we have written millions more pages and tried so many more things that if I want to fly, I don’t need to reinvent the airplane. This is the superpower of humanity, we don’t have to reinvent every time.

We all know enough about capitalism, socialism, etc. to act. Instead we prefer to sit and wank longer about the best possible society; meaning all we can do is endlessly talk about the best possible society.

The only way to actually build one is to learn what’s needed and act. Who cares what label it has, who cares if the theory is sound or not. If it doesn’t work in practice, you iterate forward.

I’m not going to reply to any more stupidity in here. Go theorize all you want. I’ll just leave one comment.

Otherwise it’s like saying you want to be able fly without developing theories of physics, aerodynamics, and internal combustion engines.

Check a history book, that’s precisely how we started flying.

I’m well aware. I guess good luck instituting socialism then. I bet you get far.

To not be a dick. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We have don’t have a coherent system, we have aspects of many, but the western ‘cult’ worships at the alter of capitalism. But we have a very corrupted version of it, that includes socialist, and authoritarian, and fascist tendencies. Things are far too entrenched to simply say, replace the system we have with this other one.

No system has ever been instituted to its definition, there is always unique challenges and differences and personalities. Spending time instituting a whole scale replacement, is time that will be wasted. Instead, we need a strategy of implementation through attrition. Forget the isms, just work on addressing the problems, and eventually we can build a better system.

It has a corrupt form of capitalism. It also has corrupt socialism.

So, do the good shit and I personally belive a socialist style system will result. It’s the work against the corruption that is the hard part.

we don’t have capitalism. But fuck any ism, just find the broken shit and fix it. People think there’s one trick, one system, one thing that will fix shit. Nothing will but work, time, effort, good judgement. What worked yesterday, won’t work tomorrow, at least without updating it.

Yeah, capitalism is fucked. I don’t want to put in another fucking ism, I want to buckle the fuck down and fix the shit that’s wrong.

these are not two sides. The system is working as some intend so needs to be dismantled, at least large parts of it, to fix it.

People always forget, nuance exists.

I have no opinion on the Star Wars/Dune debate but that is one fantastic comment. Kudos to the author, brought me quite a smile.