Yes , the contract plans are a fair bit more than pay as you go with a phone bought outright . But , the newest phones usually come out at ~$ 200 with a contract renewal , and before long are under a hundred . I paid $ 50 for my S 7 with a Samsung Gear . Black Friday deals probably have quite a few options as well . <| sep |> personal experience and anecdotal of my friends that i went to one withgod thats a terrible sentence . but we went to a top rated one in nyc . friends are now at places ranging from google amazon two sigma amex . i ended up at a mid size startup that made it . i was a cs major originally but abandoned it for a civil engineering degree . my class was full of med school dropouts , law school , finance folk . a lot of the fundamentals brought up in the original post can almost be deduced entirely from logic . a major part of this industry is how fast you can pick up new languages , and how much you can save your coworkers from going to stack overflow . there is a ton of empirical knowledge necessary . saying you should value the theoretical stuff is entirely up to the job itself . are you a researcher or a consultant . if you ' re the latter , practical stuff is more valuable .