
Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study - jotaen
https://www.jotaen.net/2e2Ff/sabbatical-self-study-reflection/
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christiansakai
I am not doing any Sabbatical right now, but I am currently soul searching.
I've been working as a fullstack dev for more about 5 years. I do have CS
background, and think myself as quite a decent programmer. But in my day job,
or I suspect in most day jobs out there, CRUD stuff, nothing is really
interesting and it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical
skills. Though of course, you improve bit by bit everyday just by code review,
bug squashing, practicing best practices, do better tests, etc. But mostly
these are the mundane tasks.

While you can argue that technical skills have diminishing returns, but I do
really want to focus more on it at this point of my life.

I see it in HN, Reddit, everyday people make very cool projects and I wonder
what it will take for me to reach that level?

Anyway, I decided to buy the book "Engineering a Compiler" and set a goal to
actually finish it. I guess that's my soul searching direction will go for
now.

~~~
playing_colours
> it is really hard to make a leap in improvement in technical skills.

This is true, particularly, if you work full-time, and your job is not
connected to the subject of your passion. You will have few hours in the
evening, but for a hard subject you may not have enough energy.

You can try remote work, it worked for me. Currently, my client allows 2-3
days a week of working from home, and also now I’m looking for my next place
for a full remote position. I save 1.5 hours on commute, 20 mins on lunch. So
I have additional time and energy to focus on maths, building things, and
running.

There is an additional barrier to move into a different or more advanced
field: most companies want to hire people already experienced in particular
areas. It will be very hard to convince a company that you can learn fast and
contribute and also that they can already benefit from your current skills and
technical maturity. It looks risky for them, they may have relevant
candidates, or do need such expertise right now.

Our industry love talking about fixed vs. growth mindset, how crucial is the
latter. At the same time, the hiring at many companies is a vivid example of
fixed mindset towards candidates: your current skills matter infinitely more
than you potential. The thing is it can also be hard to convince them that you
actually can acquire required knowledge fast: you know, everyone says to be a
“quick learner” in their CV.

I think your situation is typical and for some people the only solution was to
start their own business eventually, and outplay the system.

So, focus on improving yourself in the evening and keep trying to find your
way in!

~~~
hos234
The barriers are all in the mind.

The simplest way to upgrade skills is to work with teams working on problems
of interest to you, where you have to meet up with them, atleast once a week
if not more. The social aspect is what drives learning.

Doesn't matter if you are working full time. Find a subject that interests you
THEN find/contact research labs/profs/startups working on it. Tell them you
have X hours a week (for 3 or 6 months) you want to devote to it and ask them
for an assignment. If you have more experience and skill than the avg grad
student they employ, it's easy to find a project.

I have done this with incubators, univ labs and research labs close to me. I
am luckily in a large city, where once you start looking, you will find all
kinds of interesting characters doing interesting things. Follow their blogs,
twitter feeds and github repos. Identify where you want to contribute. Make a
small bug fix or document some aspect of their code and the door opens.

~~~
playing_colours
This is a great comment. We need to keep questioning our internal barriers and
self-limiting assumptions. Thanks for reminding!

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alistproducer2
I'm doing something similar. I got undergraduate degrees in CS and business
and worked 5 years for a large corp right out of school. I saved my money and,
using a rollover for business startup, I funded my business. I'm lucky enough
to have a 2-earner household and a partner that is giving me time to figure
out where I want to go next. I've been on "sabbatical" for a little over a
year. I've had a couple false starts with respect to the business.

In the last couple weeks I've decided that I too wanted to level-up on my hard
skills but away from CS. I've never been too enamored with trying to sell a
product or service that had a lower barrier to entry for competitors. Too much
convincing and pitching and , uggh, selling for my tastes.

I've always been interested in Chemistry so I decided to teach myself using
textbooks. I realized a while ago that if you have an interests in a subject
strong enough to keep you reading and working through a textbook, you can
learn anything to a high level because hiding in the pages of a college
textbook is the knowledge of many decades of human discovery, engineering, and
passion as well hundreds of hours of hours of lecturing, teaching, and even
tests (assuming you buy the answer manual). Almost any college course you'll
ever take will be a watered-down, rushed meander through a couple chapters in
a textbook. If you are willing to go through those chapters, in full, and do
most or all of the exercises, you can learn basically anything on your own to
a undergrad or graduate (MS) level.

And if you're fortunate enough, as I have been, to be able to fund your own
company, your lack of degree doesn't matter because you don't need to signal
to anyone that you know what your doing because you are doing the hiring.
Granted for what I'm trying to do, I will hire a person with a degree to "head
up" my labs for outside credibility's sake.

~~~
parf02
Web developer with a background in Chemistry here! Hit me up if you want to
discuss Chemistry-related software development :)

~~~
selimthegrim
What sort of stuff do you do?

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gorpomon
For those wanting something a bit less intense, the Recurse Center in NYC is a
great place to practice a few months (or now even just a week) of self study
with some of the brightest folks you'll ever meet.

~~~
jczhang
Anything similar in LA?

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Eylandos
Nice post Jotaen but I feel you are heavily downplaying how well a mechanical
engineering degree looks when switching. You have math and critical thinking
skills but just needed a little time to get the fundamental computer science
concepts down.

Also how does the idea of boredom come into play here? Yes self-studying is
important but at what point do feel burned out and want to apply it in a real
world work station?

~~~
jotaen
Yes, I definitely profit from basic skills that I acquired in studying
mechanical engineering, as you mentioned. However, when applying for jobs I
didn’t have the impression that my prospective employers valued that too much,
at least as far as my CV is concerned.

Not sure what you mean by “boredom”? I don’t have a clear “definition of done”
or a deadline for my sabbatical, that’s also why I try to diversify the topics
I’m looking at rather than going through them one after the other. I’ll
definitely need/will start working again in a couple of months, but my hope is
that working freelance and continuing self-studying is not mutually exclusive.
But I’ll need to see next year how this works out then in practice.

~~~
Aperocky
I'm currently in software but graduated from mechanical as well.

I think one of the biggest drawback of the current education system is the
assumption that people should have one major and that it would last throughout
their career. In reality, most of the skill learned ended up being not used,
the proportion of the major is basically the opposite of what the job market
actually need. And the constraint of it actually ruined a lot of people and
careers. I've been fortunate to be able to choose whatever class I want in
college and discover my love for programming - if not for that I might be in a
much less productive place today.

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khiner
I also recently took about 10 months off of work, specifically to focus on
learning. It was incredible, and I don’t regret it financially. I would often
get up at 6 in the morning or even earlier (which I never do) just from
excitement about what I was going to learn about and accomplish in the day.
Spending my time focused Only on what I was most interested in was incredibly
rewarding. It’s going to be awhile before I am able to do it again
financially. It is a life-impacting hit to the bank account, especially
factoring opportunity costs, but I agree with the OP that it feels well worth
it as an investment in myself. Can’t wait til I get the chance again.

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ggambetta
I'm also on a sabbatical, and to some extent, also self-studying -- but
focusing on filmmaking. I'm acting, writing, directing, and producing!

I recently made this hour-long, no-budget feature film about an evil social
media company, available on Prime Video: [https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-
Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1](https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-
Jones/dp/B07ZZMXGK1) Worse than even The Room, but might be the first movie
including a realistic depiction of a FAANG interview?

~~~
christiansakai
Looks interesting. I’ll watch it

~~~
ggambetta
I did say "worse than The Room". You've been warned ;)

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asdfman123
I don't see how you guys have an appetite for this kind of thing after years
of education and full time work. If I take a sabbatical, I'm walking across
New Zealand.

~~~
guidoism
Yeah there's no way I could have done this five years out of school. I
remember contemplating getting my pilot's license just a few years out of
school and after looking at now much I needed to study I was like: Hell no.

But 20 years out of school — This was ideal for me. Walking across New Zealand
sounds awesome and if my kids were older I'd do it, but honestly I'm really
happy just reading books, watching videos, and tinkering with different ways
to program.

After decades in the industry I can't say enough about how awesome it is to
not have a schedule, boss, meetings, performance evaluations, 1:1s, deadlines,
people counting on you to make the right decisions (though I guess my wife and
kids would argue that they still depend on my decisions).

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hwwc
I'm also taking a sabbatical! I guess mine is also self study, although I
never quite thought of it that way. I've taken this time to be able to have
in-person lunches with many interesting people, work on open source projects,
and sit in on seminars at the local university. I think I'm just beginning to
learn how to access local resources for learning.

I'm also thinking of freelancing, and have been gearing up for contracts, and
also to perhaps start an agency with a friend. I really value the freedom that
has allowed me to explore my programming and math (and climbing/yoga/martial
arts) interests these last few months.

One unexpected thing about my sabbatical: my social life is better, I have way
more time and energy for it :)

~~~
mcrwfrd
I love the idea of taking sabbatical. If I were to take time for one, I think
the structure would look more like what you're suggesting here. Expanding
network of people to learn from and contributing to OSS.

As introverted as I am, I have learned in recent years how much easier and
faster it can be to learn from other people than from textbooks alone.

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faitswulff
Having done this multiple times myself, I have to say...not everyone is wired
for it. I spent a lot of time in coffee shops on reddit and, of course,
hackernews.

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moosey
I am 20 years out of college with a CS degree, working in your typical
business rules development kind of job. Exactly the kind of job that doesn't
need a CS degree, but I'm perfectly decent at programming business rules, so
there's that.

Last year, I've been on a learning binge myself, due to the fact that I want
to understand the underlying workings of the technologies that are shaping our
near future. In this interest, I have taken what little time I have (with a
job and two children) to relearn the baseline college mathematics that I've
lost from my apathy towards serious continuing education. I first completed
the course "Learning How to Learn" and applied the practices within to courses
in Calculus and Physics. I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on
the OCW website on MIT.

I was never a great student, and it could be just because, as I think I've
discovered, I'm just a slow learner. My early educational talents and
successes were due to a lot of early reading that I did, but it's clear to me
that it takes a lot of repetition before I start to understand a subject, and
I often have to go back over lectures, then read the associated notes, and run
through a ton of practice problems (which I then put into anki) before I grasp
a subject. Due to this my learning has been slow (along with the two kid
situation), but I'm certain now that I have a much better grasp of the subject
matter than I did when I was twenty. I'm not suggesting I'm smarter with age,
what I am suggesting is that I didn't have study habits that allowed me to
flourish.

Clearly, the current educational models that we are using in our schools are
failing students like me who get a good head start due to early reading, but
can't learn fast enough to keep up in a classroom environment. It is clear
from what I've learned about the learning process from Barbara Oakley and
others that the actual processes that we put in place are further suboptimal
for the learning process, but the ways that we set up our education system are
not the result of experimentation. If I were to surmise their source, I would
say that they are explicitly designed to fail, so that we can excuse reduced
spending in public education systems.

Still, these self-study courses are great for people like me, as long as you
are permitted to study at your own rate. This is important as I'm going to
guess that perserverance is as important as intelligence when it comes to
advancing to the point where you can aid research teams. I predict that
nations that automate educational models (as well as hiring a broad staff of
educators, lecturers, and tutors) that are successful will have a much larger
impact on the future of the information age than they did in previous eras.

~~~
sidusknight
> I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT.

It's probably too late for that course, but IMO MIT's courses on edx are much
better structured than on MIT OCW or whatever it's called.

~~~
moosey
I've done edx, Coursera, now mit ocw, khan academy, and plan on continued
experimentation. The best tool overall I've found is Anki.

I've also tried to keep my learning carried with lots of reading. The most
academic book of the year I had was"energy and civilization".

I would strongly recommend learning how to learn to help formulate a learning
plan and making sure you get the right level of challenge.

------
emmanueloga_
Thinking back on all the subjects I've ever studied and books I've read, I've
lost a lot of familiarity with many of those subjects (although I do find
myself picking up much faster when I come back, even years later).

I dream of taking this kind of sabbatical too, it is just a bit scary to do it
without some kind of framework that would allow me to plan my week, and
annotate, structure, accumulate, and review the things that I learn. I feel
like I should focus on finding / designing that system before planning on
taking the sabbatical.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I suspect it will work out well.

I've been in an "involuntary" sabbatical. When I left the company I'd been at
for over a quarter-century (mostly as a manager, but very technical), I
immediately ran into "Go away, old man. Nobody wants you."

It was pretty jarring, insulting, and humiliating, but what really happened,
was I got upset.

When I get upset, I get busy (paraphrased from "Back to School").

Fortunately, I have the means to set up my own company (I actually have 2),
and I have spent the last couple of years ferociously focused on working full-
time to write software, using the most modern and relevant techniques for my
chosen direction (Apple tech -I've been writing Apple software since 1986).

It's working well. I haven't lost a thing, in over thirty years of software
development. In fact, I seem to learn much faster, these days, than I ever
did, when I was younger. I suspect that all the context I have makes picking
up new stuff easier.

I've been building (actually, just organizing and adding to) a HUGE portfolio,
with six figures of lines of code, in dozens of repos, spanning at least a
decade (although I also reference my first engineering project, from 1987),
hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of articles and essays, and a
number of deployed and shipping solutions.

I've learned to work alone very well, indeed (I spent my entire career in HUGE
heterogenous teams; spread around the globe). That was one of the things I was
afraid I wouldn't be able to master.

The difference in productivity is staggering. I often get more done by 8:30AM,
than I used to get done all day as a corporate software developer (I get up
early, and close my green ring by 6AM).

I tend to be all about "Get Stuff Done." I like theory and experimentation,
but I've been writing shipping software my entire career, so that's the
direction I've picked. I heard a guy once say "The #1 feature of the project
is SHIPPING."

Working alone has forced me to keep the scope humble, which has worked out,
after I learned to adjust my project plans. The biggest coefficient for me has
always been quality. I like to think of myself as a craftsman. I get special
joy from writing high-quality software.

One of the biggest lessons that I've taught myself was how to be very, very
flexible (I call it "ultra-agile"). My corporate background was Victoria Falls
(REAL Waterfall). I have been yearning to break free of that yoke for decades.

Working alone has allowed me to explore an evolutionary design and
construction process that has, so far, worked fairly well.

The story is still very much unfolding, and we'll see how it goes. I still
have a lot to learn, and I like it.

More Will Be Revealed...

~~~
AA-BA-94-2A-56
Very cool commnent mate, look forward to hearing about what you'll do in the
near future.

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cryptozeus
I was hoping for more details as to what you have been doing and how it has
been.

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nafizh
Can anyone tell me what's the font used in the article? It's beautiful.

~~~
jotaen
It’s the “Input” font family by David Jonathan Ross.

[https://input.fontbureau.com/](https://input.fontbureau.com/)

~~~
nafizh
Thanks!

