More power to those friends. I've tried that road personally and it's brutally hard. If you have the financial runway and can get credits for GE classes, a bachelors in CS could be done quickly like you said. No payoff is guaranteed, but the stats are skewed heavily in favor of it being a good idea. By the time you get through it the hiring downturn should be in the rearview mirror. Pursuing the degree is a very structured way to make sure you're on the right learning track and probably a worthwhile distraction from the personal stuff. If you go that route, get internships, have side projects, and grind leetcode a little bit each day. You can do it.

You may find this to be even more true about the career paths you listed. Becoming a SWE is tough without the four-year degree to break through the recruiter wall. Many bootcamps, despite the marketing, are money grabs with poor placement results. Be wary.

Reasonable. Not everyone reading your comments assumed so much. This whole comment chain turned into a nit-picking back and forth rather than advice for the OP.

For what it's worth I didn't read that much into the comment. You both assumed too much of each other.

Shame on me. I'd like to blame being on a phone for that, but I'll eat it. Thanks for the correction and pointing out it's still reasonably higher.

Surprisingly to many, this has been standard practice for many GMO seed mixes. BT corn bags often have a 5-10% content of other corn varieties to act as an attractor for pests. This gives, say cutworms, a habitat plant within the acreage and reduces the evolutionary pressure that would make them resistant to the BT toxin over time.

We can prove it with some light math. 20 lbs protein per bushel and the average yield for top ~15 states is about 50 bushels per acre. Converting that to kg protein per ha: 20x2.2x50x2.5 = 5,500 kg of protein per hectare using straight soy. That's more that 10x higher than the research mentioned in that article. The main reason for their result is the horrendously low yield on their control group.

https://ussec.org/resources/conversion-table/

TL;DR sometimes mixing two or more cereal crops can have benefits in various areas if stress conditions are at play and if those cereals have similar maturation times. Responses are highly dependent on locality and varieties.

None of the species related to three sisters planting are relevant here. This article is about cereal grain variety and species mixing.

Three sisters planting is not higher yielding than rotating the same crops on the same land and it is massively labor inefficient by modern standards. I wouldnt even recommend it at small scale.

Edit: Follow the science downvoters.

No. That's not what the OP or research here are saying.

Those are impactful aspects, but separate from hybridization. A variety with poor genetic potential grown in optimal conditions will still yield poorly.