> They want to pay me a ton of money for this? I'd do it for free!

Happy to see that other's found this too :) This was my experience with CS—I always loved it and I am, to this day, still surprised that they pay me so much because I used to do this exact same stuff at home for fun. I feel like I got exceptionally lucky that my passion just so happens to be something exceptionally profitable because I have no idea what I'd do otherwise.

Reminds me of many accounts by fighter pilots in WW2. "I can't believe they pay me to fly these things!"

Can you imagine flying a P-51? I splurged and bought a 30 minute ride in the back seat. Sigh. Holy Crap! Pure heaven! I was smiling for the next week.

The German Bundeswehr solved that problem by not letting their pilots fly and instead promote them to some managerial office jobs. That is still cheaper than paying for real flight hours.

Did you actually learn how they work or how to just use them out of a table?

I learned them. They changed nasty* differential equations into simple algebra problems. Oh boy did I learn them.

*Or rather I thought at the time they were nasty. Later I learned about nonlinear differential equations, where Laplace transforms don't help.