Hard agree. I can include myself in the group of survivors. I was a military officer commanding tank units until my early 30 and I originally planned to move into the Army's ORSA program, which requires a quantitative background, so went back to school for Applied Mathematics, ended up falling in love with programming, and did a Master's in CS after discharging from the service and here I am years later doing fine. And I don't think I'm lacking in core CS knowledge, either.
But I'm not going to sit here and say "oh, anyone can just go back to school full time while also working full time and complete a grad program at a top ten CS school with a 4.0 GPA and triple their salary within five years." The reality is this world has been set up for people like me to succeed. You see all these posts here about how terrible the Leet Code experience is but I've been working through all of the problem sets in math textbooks for fun since I was 5. I love this stuff and wish I'd have discovered it sooner. My family didn't even own a computer when I was a kid and I had no idea this even existed as a possible career field. But I won spelling bees when I was a kid. I won a television quiz show and got a perfect SAT score. I live for intellectual challenges and love being tested.
If that describes you as well, then great, the knowledge economy is your oyster. But no, that doesn't mean anyone can do it. Even at an elite engineering school and in industry since, I've seen very smart people struggle tremendously through something I figured out in minutes.
Doesn't mean I'm some kind of great or special person. Thanks to spine injuries I suffered in the service, I can hardly get out of bed some days, and for 99% of human history, I'd have been discarded as a worthless piece of trash holding back the rest of the tribe and been thrown to the wolves. I'm just really, really lucky I was born now and not during most of human history.
But I'm not going to sit here and say "oh, anyone can just go back to school full time while also working full time and complete a grad program at a top ten CS school with a 4.0 GPA and triple their salary within five years." The reality is this world has been set up for people like me to succeed. You see all these posts here about how terrible the Leet Code experience is but I've been working through all of the problem sets in math textbooks for fun since I was 5. I love this stuff and wish I'd have discovered it sooner. My family didn't even own a computer when I was a kid and I had no idea this even existed as a possible career field. But I won spelling bees when I was a kid. I won a television quiz show and got a perfect SAT score. I live for intellectual challenges and love being tested.
If that describes you as well, then great, the knowledge economy is your oyster. But no, that doesn't mean anyone can do it. Even at an elite engineering school and in industry since, I've seen very smart people struggle tremendously through something I figured out in minutes.
Doesn't mean I'm some kind of great or special person. Thanks to spine injuries I suffered in the service, I can hardly get out of bed some days, and for 99% of human history, I'd have been discarded as a worthless piece of trash holding back the rest of the tribe and been thrown to the wolves. I'm just really, really lucky I was born now and not during most of human history.