Ask HN: Is a Master's in CS worth it?

I think if you're currently in academia, I can't give too much weight to your opinion.

Yes, you'll get a relatively deep introduction to lots of different research and interesting areas. If your goal is to do research, or work for an organisation that specialises in a field..

Start a project related to that field. Learn as you go. Publish. Network. Keep a part-time programming/dev job to support its development.

You'll save 3-5 years, you won't go into debt, you will work much less, you'll learn about the field and build a network of peers globally as you meet people online and you'll have a headstart on your career not being hired as a grad that will be treated by a toddler, but as a peer with valuable domain knowledge.

You'll probably shave 5-6 years overall off your career trajectory.

If you can't self-motivate... Go the grad path. But the grad path sucks if you don't have money, have to support yourself or if you don't want to go into debt. It's also slow, full of bureaucracy and if you're an international student - supports a really crappy industry engineered to exploit you.

This is just a note, my motivation for Masters was for specialization in distributed algorithms.

The Masters degree has opened a lot of opportunities to the people I study with, yes you need to be a good student (high distinction at least) to get these opportunities but they are there.

If you are willing to put in hours and hours of study a day, it will almost guarantee interesting work when you graduate.

Yes if you just perform averagely, it probably won't help you to break into your area of specialization right after uni.

Out of people I know, one is working at Jane Street on the OCaml compiler now. Another is working on Azure at Microsoft, another on powershell at Microsoft. A friend has managed to get internships at Atlassian, Facebook and is now interviewing with a well known database company (I will leave the name out, since its an ongoing interview) to work on distributed systems stuff there.

I've had a few interesting opportunities through my masters as well, currently I am working on a real time social media topic discovery platform.

To add to this, the skill difference of the average undegrad student I encountered and the average Masters student I encountered was quite high.

Additionally, the grad path also allows for research alongside world leading experts in their field (Depending on the university).

To do add to this, most universities allows for exchange, at my institution, students are granted the opportunity to go to universities such as ETH Zurich (4th in the world for comp sci) and Imperial College London (9th in the world for comp sci).

These will not only look great on a resume for someone looking for their first job, it will allow the students to network with other students who will likely be in the top of their fields.

To add to this so many people that are specialized have advanced degrees. It's really hard to find research papers by people who do not have an advanced degree.

I do agree universities do take advantage of international students, UoM is awful with international students, they have lower standards for them, so that they come here, fail and have to repeat subjects over and over again.

I've stayed in my engineering role, but it's absolutely given me an advantage in certain aspects of my job. I can more effectively communicate with IT, and I find myself in leadership positions because I can bridge the gap between IT and Engineering.

I think at the end of the day though, the Master's is not going to give you the knowledge to ace a FAANG interview.