War Story: I Ditched My CS Degree for a Bootcamp and Became a Go 1.25 Engineer I never thought I’d be writing this. Two years ago, I was three semesters into a traditional Computer Science degree, drowning in abstract calculus and outdated Java curriculum, wondering if I’d ever write code that actually mattered. Today, I’m a backend engineer working full-time with Go 1.25, building low-latency microservices for a fintech startup. Here’s how I ditched the degree, survived a coding bootcamp, and landed my dream role. Why I Left My CS Degree My CS program was everything I didn’t want. Lectures were 200-person auditoriums where professors read slides verbatim. We spent 12 weeks on C++ memory management (using a compiler from 2010) and another 10 on discrete math proofs that never tied back to real-world engineering. I wanted to build things, not memorize Big O notation for algorithms I’d never implement.…