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Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

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Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#51

Post by ggorlen »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #46
ggorlen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know. https://www.omscentral.com/ and talking to other students helped a great deal with planning. Two difficult classes I took together were Embedded Systems Optimization and Compilers, both taught by the same instructor and with similar concepts, so working on one helped solidify concepts in the other. On the other hand, I took Distributed Computing during its first offering alongside Graduate Algorithms an…

Wow, I thought I was masochistic. What possessed you to take DC and GA (two of the hardest classes) together? I took DC alone and found it manageable if you weren't a perfectionist. Compilers was the most difficult thing I've ever done, though that was mostly due to my own poor time management during phase 3 (generating the intermediate representation). I didn't complete phase 3, so most of my time during phase 4 (em…

It was the first online cohort of DC so I didn't realize how intensely difficult it'd be. I'd taken GIOS with Ada which was gentle, so I figured DC wouldn't be significantly harder.

It was a good life experience even though I wound up sacrificing my 4.0 by a few grade points. In hindsight, had I realized how steep the curve would be for DC, I'd have pushed a bit harder to squeeze out a few more test cases, but I was pretty mentally defeated at the time and felt like I'd exhausted all of the ideas I had on the projects multiple times over.

I found DC more difficult than compilers by a wide margin because of the nondeterminism, debugging difficulty and trying to figure out what the test harness was even doing. Compilers involved writing more lines of code, but it was manageable, synchronous greenfield application design.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#52

Post by gsch1 »

If you can secure a scholarship, I would definitely recommend going for it. You’ll gain a lot of knowledge and earn respect with a master’s degree. Whether it leads to something more depends on how you use your degree and the opportunities you create for yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#53

Post by fuzztester »

fuzztester wrote: post #41
ggorlen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider that taking 5-10 graduate courses and writing a master's level thesis or project will generally take all of your free time and a bunch of your savings over the course of two or more years. (I sure hope you're not thinking to take on debt for this!) OMSCS graduate. The program certainly ate up most of my free time for 2.5 years, but on the other hand, the whole degree was about $8k for me and required no th…

>OMSCS. From the Georgia Tech online course?

I googled and answered my own question:

https://omscs.gatech.edu/

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#54

Post by musicale »

musicale wrote: post #45
shepherdjerred wrote: post #11

Take a look at the OMSCS. Great degree, very cheap, and you can do it while you work. https://omscs.gatech.edu/ Happy to chat about my experience with the program, feel free to email me: hn@sjer.red

This looks like a winner to me as well. Personally I find university courses to be motivating, and unlike other programs this doesn't seem to be designed to rip you off or put you in debt. You learn the same good material as on-campus students, and you get an MS out of it from a good engineering school. The credential is meaningful because it requires completion of courses that are difficult but also designed to teac…

The down side is that: it takes time and money, and nobody will give you a raise because you have an MSCS (though maybe it could help with changing jobs). But the actual knowledge and skills are useful if you can put them to use, and you may also find the courses to be satisfying in themselves.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#55

Post by shepherdjerred »

musicale wrote: post #54
musicale wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a winner to me as well. Personally I find university courses to be motivating, and unlike other programs this doesn't seem to be designed to rip you off or put you in debt. You learn the same good material as on-campus students, and you get an MS out of it from a good engineering school. The credential is meaningful because it requires completion of courses that are difficult but also designed to teac…

The down side is that: it takes time and money, and nobody will give you a raise because you have an MSCS (though maybe it could help with changing jobs). But the actual knowledge and skills are useful if you can put them to use, and you may also find the courses to be satisfying in themselves.

The entire OMSCS program costs about $6000-$7000, depending on if you take one or two classes per semester.

That's not free, but it is an undeniably great value for the money.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#56

Post by brudgers »

In a person's late 30's job prospects for professional jobs are primarily a function of the person's professional network. If you get a degree in CS, you will be one among many fresh CS grads. What will stand out is your age and work history. These will raise a natural and reasonable question "Why hasn't this person been hired by someone who has seen their work or worked with them?"

For someone whose job is going through 1000 cold call resumes a day, "No" has a low bar because the shortlist is only a small fraction of the resumes. It's not impossible. But by your late 30's "potential" is not a saleable asset.

Go to school to learn something you are directly interested in. If you want a job in BCI, Ai, aerospace, etc. apply for jobs in BCI, Ai, aerospace, etc. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#58

Post by whiterknight »

swatcoder wrote: post #9

Consider that taking 5-10 graduate courses and writing a master's level thesis or project will generally take all of your free time and a bunch of your savings over the course of two or more years. (I sure hope you're not thinking to take on debt for this!) And while you'll absolutely learn some things and find yourself excited about some ideas in those couple years, you will forget almost all of the stuff your learn…

> you will forget almost all of the stuff your learned

Speak for yourself.

You are also developing a meta skill of being able to read technical material, and a fluency with basic concepts (algorithms, signals, etc)

Also sometimes learning something isn’t knowing exactly how to do it on the spot, but knowing it’s the right thing to look up when you need it.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#59

Post by alice-i-cecile »

deeptechdreamer wrote: post #15
swatcoder wrote: post #9

Consider that taking 5-10 graduate courses and writing a master's level thesis or project will generally take all of your free time and a bunch of your savings over the course of two or more years. (I sure hope you're not thinking to take on debt for this!) And while you'll absolutely learn some things and find yourself excited about some ideas in those couple years, you will forget almost all of the stuff your learn…

Yes, I want to be a PM with deep technical understanding. What are the other more efficient paths?

Contribute to open source! This is incredibly effective: you're thrown in the deep end and surrounded by skilled mentors. If you're respectful of the needs of the team, your project management skills will be super valuable for the project as well.

Re: Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?

#60

Post by freedomben »

I pivoted from hardware to software by getting a CS degree. I would only recommend doing it if the jobs you want require a CS degree. Even then, I would probably look around and find a company who doesn't require a CS degree, as the companies that do are becoming rarer and rarer. Rather than going back to school, I would use your current foot-in-the-door to try and get more involved in the technical side of things. There's usually at least one dev who loves to explain things in as excruciating detail as you want, though definitely let him know you're asking because you want to learn, not because you want to manage.

I'm sure that many people will disagree with this, but I also don't think there's a ton of value in an MSCS unless you have a BSCS or similar technical undergrad, or unless you study/prepare your ass off learning the fundamentals before starting grad school. A CS degree certainly isn't required to be a great engineer, but most of the great engineers I've worked with did have one. The underpinnings provided by a good BSCS program will make you much better at the design side of software.

If you want to do the prep work, between MIT and other online courses it's all out there for you. You can also audit great courses for cheap at most any school you choose. Some of the most helpful classes are Algorithms, Data Structures, Operating Systems (yes! knowing what the OS is doing underneath you is important for writing performant and reliable code), and Computer Security (you should at least be writing a basic buffer overflow exploit in this class, such as the classic "defuse the bomb" assignment).

So to summarize, IIWM, I would try to find opportunities in your current role to get deeper into the technical, then practice practice practice on your own. Build a non-trivial app that does something you need. Open source it and do a Show HN, and you'll get a ton of feedback, some of which will be extremely helpful for you. Also show it to your colleagues and ask for feedback. Then look for jobs that don't require a degree. You could reasonably be getting an engineering job in 12 to 24 months. If you really want to go for the MSCS, make sure to thoroughly prepare yourself with undergrad-level work. The MSCS will (or should at least) expect you to already have a base knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and other CS-related things, and while most people can get through the program without this, they will get far, far less out of it than they could have.

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