Just a year ago I was on a project that involved building a tree of data and we wanted the ability to try adding a few things and backtrack to multiple differen

Just a year ago I was on a project that involved building a tree of data and we wanted the ability to try adding a few things and backtrack to multiple different points if it didn't work out, so there was a lot of shared data in the tree. Performance was critical and we had various operations that had to be performed regularly, so I did a lot of implementations and tested them directly. My CS degree (which I got late in my career) was invaluable. I got it precisely because I had no idea what I was missing and if I hadn't I wouldn't have investigated half the options I did and would not have had a good framework for thinking about them. I would have gotten the job done without it, but it wouldn't have been as good a job and I wouldn't have known what I was missing.