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Originally Posted by Katsunami
In the same way, it's always said that studying computer science will make you rich like never before and will give you the chance to write software that changes the world.
Do you know where most people who study CS end up? In a company, writing or maintaining some sort of administrative application, that serves as a front end to manipulate the data in a database. If you're lucky, you end up writing technical software that actually uses some algorithms to get things done.
The people that actually manage to change the world (by luck, or by being at the right place in the right time, or just having the right product at the right time) can be counted on two, maybe even one hand.
It's the same in writing. There are more and more books written and published each year, but there are very few that rise to the very top. There will be even fewer that will be remembered 50 or 100 years from now.
I've stopped believing in the "If you do such and such, you will be successful, rich and famous"-mantra, where people are pointing to a select lucky few who succeeded to show that it must be true.
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Truth! I have literally been there, done that. I bought into the Compute Science dream for a long time and do not really regret it -- as I said, it paid off my mortgage -- but I realized some 10 years ago exactly what you say --
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In a company, writing or maintaining some sort of administrative application, that serves as a front end to manipulate the data in a database. If you're lucky, you end up writing technical software that actually uses some algorithms to get things done.
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I spent the next 10 years getting things in order to do exactly what I'm doing now, giving writing another last best shot while I still have a few years in my old decrepit fingers and mind.
