Slawomir Brzezinski
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Sacha Zvetelman Thanks for feedback!

Hehe, yeah, I did get carried away about meeting the soul-mate, but the point was that an important currency of life is happiness (as you write in conclusion too) and it might be found while spending a bit more time of our limited life outside of competitive settings.

Regarding the rest, perhaps there’s a bit of misunderstanding of what things I talked about so let me try to clear it.
On game-changing ideas, I am referring to ideas which, in given times, have 99.99% risk of failure when pursued by a single company. Still, learning about them can greatly enhance the understanding of what is there to come. Arguably, formal verification of programs can be such an idea — it saves great amount of human resources, but requires refining of theory and practice, development of tools and a critical mass of adoption for availability of reusable work (libraries, working examples). While, if we are to believe Wikipedia, the subject is languishing in the software industry, I know one could rub shoulders with it at the best universities in Poland at least as early as 16 years ago.
Regarding my last point, I only mean the assessment exam for the entry and I am referring to the Maths exam to a well reputed institution, where you often need to make it into the top 10% or less percent of applicants. Achieving it will surely be much easier if you are straight after continuous practice of Maths for the previous years of education. That’s because life of majority of programmers has very little to do with Maths. Now, nothing is impossible for a motivated individual, but since the article uses one’s time as argument, then this one choice might simply save it. And the choice doesn’t have to be final by no means. After all I see the dilemma as only about ‘order of trying out things’… No one is then prevented from leaving the institution before the 5 years if it seems pertinent, or from getting a part-time job meanwhile. But by not trying, in some cases, one can indeed lose their chance that he once truly had (not scaremongering, it may not happen that often, or turn out that bad… just, it can happen).

All in all, I don’t want to say agree/disagree, because just like you, I think every choice depends on circumstances. Your article nicely lists the connections between situations and the likely better choice and I was just trying to add a few more of these.

Thanks again!