This is maybe the only place in my life where some people are as left or lefter than me, so I'm curious on perspectives. I've been studying on my own with plans to pursue a competency-based degree online -- if I prove to myself that I care enough to stick with it.
Given that by now I've become acquainted enough with two jobs to become jaded, I'm wondering how CS is (initial puzzle-solving thrill versus six years later). The tech industry can be rife with chud shit, and I doubt someone with little experience could jump straight into freelancing or working in a more solo capacity. But it's an industry I'm wholly unfamiliar with.
My career experience (ignore these two walls of text if you don't want any exposition):
Journalism: Don't regret it, but solely because it taught me the valuable lesson that I won't always know what I'll actually want in life. Started as a super-lib and left a washed-out sucker. The average reporters I met were nauseatingly status-quo -- either true-and-through bootlickers or too naive to realize themselves as free PR agents for people in power. There's something about years of condensing complicated situations to a few grafs for laymen which rots your brain into an endless chasm of cheap metaphors, impotent virtue-signaling rage, and other cliche nonsense. Met a few good ones who felt trapped like I did, but my experiences with the industry and the average journalist I met were eyerolling. I've worked manual labor jobs where older men literally screamed insults at me, and they never treated me worse (in the ways that truly mattered) than journalists did. When you have no true allies, you don't feel good, and you're not making the world any better, it's time to leave. Seriously, fuck journalism in the USA.
Education: There's a certain comfort with privatization among many teachers I meet that bothers me, but the bedrock idealism of "My actions and words impact how a child thinks" is at least something capitalism can't ruin completely. There's also a fellow commiseration to the extent that many teachers know it's a flawed institution, but we're mostly in it together. Unlike journalism you at least find less eager bootlicking. I've considered getting my Masters and progressing since currently I'm just ESL-certified, which isn't much, but I could still see myself teaching in some capacity as a lifelong career since I've had my fair share of bad days over three years and I'm still motivated enough.
Tech is amazing if you're a young (<30) white or Asian male. If you're only 1 of those 3 you can still make a very good living. If none of those 3, sorry to say but I've never seen or heard of a person like you in this field. But here's the deal. No matter what your outward characteristics are, if you want to do something, if you enjoy it, don't ever ever stop yourself from going out and doing it just because you don't fit a profile. Just get out there. It's indoor work with no heavy lifting.
Ok next up, how is CS after six years in the field? Well, I'm way past 6 years now, but when I was at 6 years I wasn't even jaded yet. The standard corporate bullshit you'll get with any job so I won't mention it. I guess what I hate the most is all the layers of garbage that make up modern web development. All sorts of different partially overlapping frameworks that break in mysterious ways. Nobody knows what the hell is actually going on, they just shrug and blame a third party vendor. It was much better when you were just writing code against an operating system. If something broke, it was your own damn fault and you fixed it. And if people used to hate DLL hell, dear lord how I hate .Net Framework vs Core. Half the features twice as confusing and the things you actually need are only available in the version you're not using.
I could be exaggerating how bad things are now. Web development is just my pet peeve. A lot of jobs use Java, might not be as bad.
The other terrible thing about this field is the way you get paid to ruin people's lives. If you work in gaming, you end up writing more addictive gambling simulators. If you work on the web, you end up siphoning as much personal data as possible to sell out your own users. That's in addition to writing a more addictive website to keep users staring at your shit for longer periods. If you're not doing either of those things, good chance you're working for a defense contractor (congratulations on the lake home by the way) so you have no soul by definition. If you're able to swing something not in any of those hell holes, congratulations.
But that's what modern civilization is all about. You only get paid if your work actively degrades other humans. Our job is to make other people rich, not to make the world a better place. But you left education knowing that already.