Ask HN: Should I return back to studies or continue to work?

And whether or not it will be useful to you is very much depending on your future career path, if you are looking forward to continued employment in that field than an extra degree certainly won't hurt, if you plan on going entrepreneur then it is of much less value (though for sure you'll benefit from the networking opportunities that come with a large university).

Five years of experience and already a third of your BSc in CS, you might be able to do it 'on the side' but that's really an exercise in self discipline.

  > The programming I do does not require advanced CS
  > knowledge, even though it never hurts to know them.

My degrees in mathematics appear pretty much useless on the surface, and rarely if ever get used directly. But when I think about business, algorithms, implementation, planning, etc., I find myself explaining things with words in my head such as "the topology" or "the metric" or "continuous" or "min-max". I then usually have to expand these to explain what I mean, and I've found yet again that the landscape in my head, put there by my studies, is helping me think things through in a way that others find difficult.

You won't need your degree, but studying this stuff (if it's a good school and you study it "properly") will have long-term intangible benefits.

The question is whether they will out-weigh the additional direct experience of working, not studying. Without knowing you I can't say, but I would tend towards learning this stuff.