I fell for this bullshit before i read the last line "This is what we have designed the Bradfield Computer Science Intensive to be."
The case against CS master’s degrees
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's making effective use of your time in standups. If you have an advanced degree and your job is making you do standups, you should get another job.
most of the eng on my team have masters degrees, and we have standups. this is common where i work and i assume other faang
You should aim for a research environment where you don't have to justify your existence to some "product manager" every 24 hours. Take it from me as an old person: if you work in stupid environments in stupid ways on stupid stuff... what happens is exactly what you'd think would happen.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#43Lots of valid criticisms here against academia, but I'll take this time to get on a mini-soapbox about communication skills. The biggest value-add I honed over the course of my academic career is my ability to communicate technical topics. Now, that isn't to say every master's student or CS degree holder is definitely better than a bootcamp grad at tech comm, in fact the winning combo there would be a communications/…
It's making effective use of your time in standups. If you have an advanced degree and your job is making you do standups, you should get another job.
Standups are the worst way of doing status updates except for all the others. For me an environment without standups is at least a yellow flag.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's making effective use of your time in standups. If you have an advanced degree and your job is making you do standups, you should get another job.
most of the eng on my team have masters degrees, and we have standups. this is common where i work and i assume other faang
Common to you means right? That was a good point, an olympic swimmer trains to swim not to explain how to swim.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#45This article makes a number of common errors:
> “Instruction” here includes faculty salaries and benefits, and a typical faculty member spends around 40% of their time on teaching-related tasks, so it’s fair to say that universities spend 10-20% of their budgets overall on teaching.
Reducing teaching costs to just faculty salaries ignores a wide array of elements that I consider teaching, including:
-- Student tutoring/learning assistance centers
-- Graduate student led discussion-sections
-- Instructional lab sections, often taught by staff, not faculty
-- Salaries for librarians, who often help students with class-related research projects
-- Open access computer labs and other facilities necessary to instruction
Most classes at a university are more than just a few faculty lectures; a big chunk of "Academic Support" and "Student Services" should also be included in the cost of instruction.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#46Someone without a formal CS education who's selling programming courses telling you that formal CS courses don't necessarily teach you programming (duh). He has a point that if you do a Master's you might be going without the extremely useful basic algorithms and data structures courses, but that is easily avoided by choosing a program that lets you take that. For other topics that aren't strictly programming, eg AI,…
For other topics that aren't strictly programming, eg AI, ML, game theory, cryptography, quantum computing, probabilistic methods, optimization,... it would take a significant amount of dedication to match the amount of understanding that a rigorous course with problem sets can give you in self study. Also, you're going to have an extremely difficult time getting to work on that stuff without a degree, given that eve…
In my experience, it's not the degree that gets you the job, it's the research you got published in the niche you're applying for. The number of people with excellent publications in such a niche, but no degree, is awfully small.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#47I have always questioned getting a 2nd masters.
I am machine learning engineer and just having the maths degree feels a bit lacking.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#48On the Contrary: A Masters Degree is often easier than an undergrad degree. You get a lot more freedom to do whatever the fuck you want. In most Universities, Masters students can teach/do research and get tuition forgiveness. If you want the experience of being in a college campus for a while without the bullshit involved in {undergrad, phd, jobs}, Masters degrees are the perfect middle ground. I did a Masters degre…
Academia is running out of ways to convince people in that trap. Evolve already. I believe academia as we know it, is in stiff decline and the problems in CS are exarcerbated because of the faster reality of software.
Any degree, by the time you have it, might be deprecated or eroded to the point is pointless. If academia doesn't accelerate the pace between education/application, only wealthy people that can afford a lifestyle without income will seek them for entertainment and that's not sustainable to keep a society educated. The value proposition is just not viable.
Education has to go the tutorial way or it will continue to decline.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#49TLDR: "I don't have a CS masters degree and I believe that getting one is not worth it and you should not purse one either. But I have my own CS course to sell you."
Not a surprise to see the article ending with the author shilling their own courses.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#50I think CS masters degrees serve one valuable purpose. They are a gateway for foreign graduates to come to the US, work on their CS masters while doing TA work to reduce the load on the professor and then get a 27 month work permit .
In fact it is cheaper to hire foreign graduates under this program compared to a US national because you get to save on FICA taxes which are approximately 15k per year.
In fact many universities are already aware on this and have built coursework only masters degrees with no research required, as that provides more tuition to the university at a foreign grad rate and let’s the students graduate earlier so that a fresh batch can take their place.