Master’s Degree in Computer Science

If so then I understand - if you've seen other people getting promoted and wondered about whether it was the extra qualifications. I am not really sure at the moment. I used to think that way and then I got a promotion which was nothing special to anyone except me - to me it was a huge breakthrough. It was not just because of my personal performance but about how extremely useful I was to my boss at the time and because he had another problem to solve which he thought he could put me onto. In other words it was all circumstances that mattered. To be fair, it is also because he is probably the best manager I've had so far (he thinks that hiring people who are nice is more important than anything).

Before my mini step-up I had been in companies where either the source of all solutions was always expected to come from outside i.e. we were to be soldiers without initiative or situations where other, better connected people were in the view of the management. There wasn't any chance for the people 2-3 levels above to form any opinions of you and the person directly above you was basically a competitor. I'm not joking that "the smokers," who had to leave the building to get their fix, was the most important clique to belong to at one place because people of all levels mixed there and got to know each other.

To get back to your Masters, I think it's a heavy investment for someone whose top concern is advancement/prestige. It feels a bit not right that the things that you want to learn about aren't at the top.

It might be that you will do all this work on learning things you're not really that interested in when it could turn out that the real problem is that you're just not working at a place where the conditions are right to show your usefulness and/or you don't have good management above you.

There is a bit of a leap from more likely on a low probability event to probably will pay off their debt. Getting promoted at a Faang company takes a good bit of work. Becoming a director is not something most people can expect. I’ve never heard of a promo committee at a Faang Corp take a degree into consideration and I’ve known plenty of director level people at faang companies who had no grad degree. If the person learns some useful new skills that could open doors. The credential might also help open some doors that an obscure college would not. But saying they are likely to make it back in 6 months is a bit of a stretch.

For two cents, I’ve been in leadership roles (VP, or VP-equiv) at three big/huge companies now (Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft) and I don’t even have a Bachelors degree. This is somewhat unusual but not a one-off by far.

Job descriptions often say “or equivalent experience” (meaning professional experience) and in probably 1-2 cases during my career, a requirement to have a degree with no “or” clause included still hasn’t been a huge issue.

Impressed with all the research you did here and and your being intentional about objectives and how to get there, good luck!