Something else to remember, though, is that:
"none of this stuff is actually 'abstract.'" There's a
business out there someplace, whose business is
not directly related to computers, and they want to hire someone to "make their problems go away."
If you simply "sit around doing 'book learning,'" you'll be like the drowned man who was found holding a textbook on
Swimming in his cold, dead, water-soaked fingers.
Get out there and
get an actual job, in an actual data center ... quite frankly, "doing
anything." Then, once you are
inside the gates,
watch! Every day you will be surrounded by people who are solving real, practical problems. They'll present
you with problems, and the first few times they do so, you will experience "pure terror."
But then, you'll discover little-by-little that you, too, are learning.
If someone tells you that you will earn "between $58,000 and $110,000," well, that statement is true. But all that they've
actually quoted you is the mean salary range for this class of occupations within the majority of the USA.
(Excluding extraordinarily-expensive places to live, such as Silicon Valley or New York City, where you earn a lot more but pay most of it out for rent and car-insurance.)
In other words: "they did not lie to you, but they permitted you to believe what you wanted to believe in what they told you."
