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Comment by auiya | Hacker News Reader

I did an online MS at Georgia Tech. I paid full price tuition for the program. Literally 3 years after I graduated, they announced a slash in price by 80 (EIGHTY!) percent. The program was excellent, and if not for my company offering to pay for it I wouldn't have considered it. I can absolutely recommend it now that it's so much cheaper, but it was also designed to be a remote program from the start.

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OMSA/OMSCS worth it? I don’t want a résumé item that may be considered watered down in the future.

Plus, with more self-study, can’t you can get into most tech companies because they tend to be more open?

Depending on your field a masters degree in anything is seen equivalent to every other masters degree. And on the other side of the spectrum, they're not considered useful by many employers/jobs.

While the mere presence of MS on a resume may not mean much to employers, I almost think it’s more important to weigh its usefulness against your current skill set. For instance, I work in tech but majored in something other than CS, and so I sometimes feel “weak” when I need to write more formal code. I’m going back to get my masters in CS so I can learn some of the foundational aspects that I unfortunately missed out on. I’m not as much concerned with fluffing my resume as I am filling the CS gaps I currently have.

Now if I did major in CS, I’m not sure I would still pursue a masters. But I didn’t, so there’s certainly value there for me.

This has been brought up before on HN: https://teachyourselfcs.com You don't get initiated by the teachers, you get initiated by doing the practice problems so you can develop schema for what strategy works.

That looks fantastic, thank you passing this along.

Mine was in information security (undergrad was CS). It was generally my experience that it didn't weigh much in the minds of hiring managers, at least not as much as real world experience. It does however seem to buy you a higher initial slotting/pay band than you would otherwise have if you were given an offer. I did learn quite a bit of useful things, qualitatively, which I can most definitely apply to my work. In my experience certs and experience tend to weigh more heavily for job accessibility.

If you are going to do OMSCS for a resume, I would say you are vastly underestimating it. Its a full fledged masters from a top 10 school and many classes require as much as 20 hours/week work sometimes. Its far from something watered down.

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