lucasosouza

Definitely pays off to go back to school. You will be in an environment where everyone around you, tenured professors and young students alike, are pushing hard to keep learning and growing. That will be specially true if you pick a research area in which the state of the art changes every 6 months (maybe distributed computing fits this description, I'm not sure, I work with AI/DL/RL).

And if you are the kind of person that can only be happy while you are personally growing, the motivation is learning in itself.

Check brilliant.org. Got everything there, worth the money.