I've a quite similar background. Brazil, mid 30s, major in Business (FGV), transitioned into dev in 2015, though I had earlier experience. Two failed companies as well :)
I agree becoming a decent full stack developer is better than doing an MS were the focus is fundamentals. However, those matter. Things like concurrency, data modeling, relational algebra, strong OOP fundamentals are used daily in any non-trivial backend work. OTOH, engineering stuff like auth, version control, testing, data cleaning and migration seems not part of the course and are quite relevant.
My personal recommendation is to learn multiple languages. You'll learn the concepts and abstract away the implementation. C++, Java, Python and R are different enough and very useful when looking for jobs.
I also recommend doing puzzles to learn algorithms and data structures. Not because you'll see a lot of them in your day to day, but a lot of places use them to weed out job applicants.
Which brings us to the most important advice of all: focus on remote work for US customers. Really. You can easily make $30/h, that translates to around 16k BRL as a "PJ". After a few years, $50/h, $70/h and even more is not unusual. That's upper mgmt level money down here with a fraction of the burden.
You can ping me at cjalmeida at gmail.com if you want to talk more.
I agree becoming a decent full stack developer is better than doing an MS were the focus is fundamentals. However, those matter. Things like concurrency, data modeling, relational algebra, strong OOP fundamentals are used daily in any non-trivial backend work. OTOH, engineering stuff like auth, version control, testing, data cleaning and migration seems not part of the course and are quite relevant.
My personal recommendation is to learn multiple languages. You'll learn the concepts and abstract away the implementation. C++, Java, Python and R are different enough and very useful when looking for jobs.
I also recommend doing puzzles to learn algorithms and data structures. Not because you'll see a lot of them in your day to day, but a lot of places use them to weed out job applicants.
Which brings us to the most important advice of all: focus on remote work for US customers. Really. You can easily make $30/h, that translates to around 16k BRL as a "PJ". After a few years, $50/h, $70/h and even more is not unusual. That's upper mgmt level money down here with a fraction of the burden.
You can ping me at cjalmeida at gmail.com if you want to talk more.