This hit so close to home that I had to comment. I can completely relate. I tried to be different and chose a path that ended up wasting 3 years of my life with

This hit so close to home that I had to comment. I can completely relate. I tried to be different and chose a path that ended up wasting 3 years of my life with nothing to show for it (PhD, ended up dropping out). Then I joined a big company to work on a product with massive (legacy) codebase, where I ended up learning relatively little w.r.t end-to-end project development. I feel as if I'd have been miles ahead if I had just done what most of my uni colleagues did instead of trying to somehow skip a step or two.