agentlangdon

Big Endian/Little Endian is a reference to Gulliver's Travels, where there was a society that argued whether to break hard boiled eggs on the little end or the big end. It is pretty much non offensive and would take a stretch to become offensive in the future.

This. I dropped out of my computer science PhD to start at the bottom of the industry in my early thirties.

If you don't have a clear love of academia, a PhD is a clearly unrewarding slog.