nomad101

Hi, I am a 30 year old (single) developer from India, had a chronic health condition due to which I spent half 20s running from hospital to hospital, just to stay alive, not cured but stable now. Working in bodyshop building CRUD web and android apps for banks for the past five years. Folks at my office see their work just as a means to a paycheck, no pride in their work. No design discussions, no adopting new frameworks, no hackathons, no functioal programming - nothing but bare minimum. Have to literlly fight to even have a discussion on writing automated tests. Every time I visit HN and see people do and discuss intricacy of architecture, programming practices, clean code, I die a litlle bit inside. How I wish I could work in a team like that.

I am worried to death (literally cannot sleep) that I have squandered my life away. Have 2 options - take a big risk & go to US for higher education, study hard and get into a tech company. OR continue at my current workplace, put in a ton of work learning the latest and greatest on MOOCs / Udacity /Pluralsight on my own, make a github profie and and apply for jobs on 'Who's Hiring?' I am even willing to work for free for a couple of years if I can find a place in a team with good engineering practices doing something challenging, to become a better engineer.

So my question, Is it worth going back to school at 30, hoping for a better career ? Learn alogritms right this time, try to get into machine learning / AI ?