In news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com timestamped Mon, 18 Jun
I am aware of two broadly similar software engineering primary degrees from a faculty: one an evening and weekend version of the regular version. Almost everybody doing the evening and weekend version had a normal supposedly fulltime job in information technology while doing their degrees and the consequences of trying to do a degree and a job tended to be bad: inferior grades; a much higher failure rate; and many people would end up failing and repeating a year.
I myself am a Ph.D. candidate in electronic engineering and as such, attending lessons and trying to pass exams is not as major a component of the degree, but I still had to do some. Though all the lectures (and, if the assessment was based on a sat exam instead of project work after the course, the exams) were held during normal working hours, I would need to conduct my research during the remaining normal working hours so I would study for the exams during my supposedly spare time (e.g. when trying to eat dinner). This was technically doable and my grades were fairly okay but some of the grades could have been better and grades do not actually matter for this Ph.D.
Anyway, though I technically could cope for a few weeks with doing research (or a job) and attending lectures and exams and doing projects and homework for a subject without a sat exam, I realized that those people doing primary degrees while also working must have been suffering. Most people who have responded in this thread supporting working and studying seem to have tried it themselves, but I would recommend restricting activities to either chiefly working or chiefly doing a degree for any stint lasting more than a few months. I do not wish to suggest which of these options is a good one, just that mixing them together seems to be a bad idea to me. "I was a little disappointed that there were various HP employees in some of the classes I took who were there only because HP required them to get a degree to advance in title and hence salary. [..] from a corporate point of view, I'm amazed that HP condones such activities. ---Joel"
Many people attend things because they are forced to and because the people who force them to attend do not really realize how the privileges are unappreciated and misused. E.g. people who attend conferences but do nothing there except read a newspaper instead of paying attention to the presentations; people whose expenses to attend conferences actually end up being used to pay for their vacations as they do not bother to attend the presentations; and people whose employers pay them to attend C++ standardization meetings who play computer games during the meetings. I did not make up any of those examples.
Sincerely, Colin Paul Gloster