Yeah I heard that a lot. You can definitely learn on your own but I think there is a lot of appeal to a structured program, access to professors, and being arou

Yeah I heard that a lot. You can definitely learn on your own but I think there is a lot of appeal to a structured program, access to professors, and being around people with common interests working on the same things as you. Id also have to quit my job to be able to study anything meaningfully so might as well. As to your second point, no I cant do any of that. Theres a million things for sure. If I could pivot from being a backend/web engineer to writing OSs or compilers or something thatd be another story, but its hard to make that kind of change. 99% of the jobs on the market are for some kind of consumer application, and I literally have zero interest in learning snother framework or tooling.