Ask HN: Makes sense to do Masters in Computer Science after 13 years experience?

I have been programming for 13 years now, which kinda makes me an old timer. I have mostly done web backends (little frontend) and DevOps, but nothing FAANG level.

I am starting to get saturated with building regular apps and doing DevOps (some of them quite cool and challenging). So I picked up Rust to get into low level systems programming. It's chugging along, but I am yet to make something cool with Rust.

I also try very hard to have an exponential personal growth. It's not been very successful so far. I do keep learning but not at a speed I consider meaningful.

This made me think, should I go ahead and pursue a Masters degree in Computer Science? Specifically in my interest subject of Distributed Computing. Is it too late for me to pursue it? Is it even meaningful given my info above? Has anyone had success with learning something Masters level without external motivation?

EDIT: I already have a Bachelor of Engineering Degree (non US)

Definitely pays off to go back to school. You will be in an environment where everyone around you, tenured professors and young students alike, are pushing hard to keep learning and growing. That will be specially true if you pick a research area in which the state of the art changes every 6 months (maybe distributed computing fits this description, I'm not sure, I work with AI/DL/RL).

And if you are the kind of person that can only be happy while you are personally growing, the motivation is learning in itself.

Thanks, I like academia, but would like to return back to industry.

I for some reason, don't like AI/ML and its cousins. I could just be bad at them, but I get annoyed with the hype around it. There of course are people doing amazing things in it, but I don't see myself among them.

It's never too late to learn as long as you're learning something you're interested in. Period. For me it was machine learning, which I started to study in 2016 (at age 43), despite having skipped math at Uni. But it was a lot of fun to learn!

Also, in my experience, you won't pick up a language by doing something unspecific. If you want to learn Rust, start a specific project which lies on the border of what you know; let's say - a HTTP proxy, preferable with some feature that you think is missing. You'll very likely fail to produce something more useful than what's out there already, but you'll learn more than what would by following tutorials.

Whether you should be pursuing an actual degree depends a lot on where you are and want to go -- but keep in mind that getting a degree is more than just taking the classes (learning environment, classmates, etc.). So, if you're primarily doing online classes alone, you might have a harder time than if you we're in a more typical university setting. So, find somebody in the same situation to use as a workout buddy!

HTH!