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Comment by chpmrc | Hacker News Reader

Yes if: they give you a scholarship AND (one of the following) it's at an ivy league college, you are deeply interested in a specific topic and you'd like to continue with a PhD, you like the work of a specific professor and he has agreed to work with you.

No if: you want to work as a software engineer (made the mistake myself, some friends are in lead positions and earn way more than me and have generally more opportunities because they worked two years more than me, even if I graduated with a 3.8 GPA from one of the top 2 unis of the country) or if you think it will boost your skills as a developer (Udemy/Coursera work better).

Maybe: if you want to work in the government where these things have a value. But spending two years of your life (even if with a scholarship) doing something that might not turn out to be a good investment just for this reason is insane.

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There's a point at where experience starts to matter a lot less. Who cares about 10 vs 12 years of experience?

Where as maybe a master's is a small advantage.

I recall reading a study showing that a master's degree hurt total lifetime earnings rather than helping them. Having a few years paying large sums for a boost in initial pay was not worthwhile because experience eventually put the two at parity. This is all from memory though. I do not have a link to reference.

However, it does make sense given that the capabilities of people with bachelor's degrees and master's degrees become equal at some point, assuming all other things are equal. I do not think a master's degree is a ticket to a lifetime of greater competence in CS and salaries ought to reflect that.

The same could be said for PhDs too given the quality of work that we saw come out of places like Sun. There are plenty of CS people that I believe have only bachelor degrees that are not in any way inferior to holders of PhDs and in some ways, are more capable because their solutions are demonstrated to work in the field. I imagine some of them will receive honorary PhDs for their work.

This is not relevant to someone without a bachelor in CS though. I will post my opinion on that separately.

I got my masters while I worked over 4 years. Not always required to quit work.

You can often get your employer to foot the bill too.

I think at that point the comparison will be _what_ experience is in those 10 vs 12 years

Unless you're doing heavily theoretical work, no one even thinks about your education after you have a few years of real experience under your belt. In practical terms, real experience is many times more valuable than "education".

If you're going to look for a job in academia or research, then yeah, the educational background will matter. If you're going to write code that makes things work, it doesn't matter.

It depends on what those years are -- it is the old cliche that there is a difference between 10 years of experience, and one year of experience repeated 10 times.

The same is true for the difference between 10 and 12. If those additional 2 years were more of the same, they matter little. But they also could have been full of significant new work and learning.

No? How is he supposed to learn basic theory of data structures and algorithms? Of course everything can be learned outside of college, but doing that in a part time unstructured way is not easy.

Knowing relevant theory is power. Is the goal to be an enterprise CRUD programmer or an architect who is a thought leader and helps set the direction of what you're working on?

I know everything can be done without a degree, I have a few genius friends who are doing great. But could they have had more options to choose from, more freedom, more potential with a degree? Hard to say, but most people don't self-learn everything they would otherwise.

I think what chpmrc means is that going for a Masters degree in CS versus stopping at a Bachelors degree in CS may or may not be of value.

I'm not sure you're right. I read OP as already having a BS in another discipline, and considering doing a CS masters (without a BS CS first).

rahimnathwani that's correct. for this person a masters would be like intro to cs.

I kind of agree and disagree I work a lot with distributed systems so I have to read a lot of papers, and I have to implement a lot of data structures myself, however I am severely lacking in formal education. While initially my lack of education was a difficult barrier I overcame it pretty quickly. I also have been writing nontrivial code in haskell just to improve my use of scala so that's more of academia I have to deal with.

But I still stand by the fact that unless you're going to stanford, CMU, or MIT, or a professor who is not strictly a theorist at an above average school takes a liking to you.

If not and you really enjoy the field you're better off teaching yourself.

Also: yes, if you want to immigrate to a Western country.

If you want to work in a more academic area such as Machine Learning it would be helpful. For something like frontend development it would not be very useful.

Even if someone is going to do front-end development, Western countries' immigration authorities typically award a big boost in points for graduate degrees in critical fields (e.g., frequently CS).

A lot of countries grant citizenship based on some points system. In most of them having a Master's degree brings you more points.

Is it a good idea for an Indian to use masters as an entry point to the US industry?

In general, Ivy league schools aren't that great for CS education. It makes sense of its a top 10 or 20 CS program.

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