My Masters was a complete waste of time and didn't help at all.
The case against CS master’s degrees
51–60 of 134 posts
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#52On 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…
How did you pay for living expenses while getting the degree?
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#53A quick master's is generally always worth it in a technical field.
Most Universities have a way where you can spend a single extra year or two max and tack a Master's onto your Bachelor's with testing or a quick project. If you can do this, do it.
On the flip side, if you're not getting a PhD, avoid the thesis Master's like the plague. It will suck up vast amounts of time and isn't worth the risk.
The money bump combined with the doors opened because you have a "credential" is very useful over the course of your career. It also has an impact when layoffs and promotions come around because you can be associated with the "research" groups while pure Bachelor's are blocked by silly HR rules.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#54My experience: I got a master's degree from a pretty weak school about 10 years ago. There was rampant cheating on tests and I didn't learn that much. While I'm not sure it helped me land any jobs, I do think it did help me get a higher salary at a few places.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#55On 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…
Any degree, by the time you have it, might be deprecated or eroded to the point is pointless.
In what way is a Masters in Comp Sci going to be deprecated or pointless in the 1-2 years it takes to earn it?
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#56It seems astonishing that people are paying large sums of money to obtain master's degrees in anything. If you have no opportunity to get paid as a research assistant / teaching assistant and have tuition covered by some other route, like a grant or something, then it's probably not a real graduate program, just a means of extracting cash from aspiring students.
Real research and teaching programs need graduate students and will offer you a package of some sort if they think you're any good.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Any degree, by the time you have it, might be deprecated or eroded to the point is pointless. In what way is a Masters in Comp Sci going to be deprecated or pointless in the 1-2 years it takes to earn it?
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Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why do you think standups are stupid?
They are merely a way to understand what the rest of the team is working on and to make sure you have the resources you need to do your job without having to interrupt you later or are you having to interrupt somebody else later it takes 15 minutes and it often saves hours of wheel spinning.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#59On 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…
> 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.
That’s just CS you are talking about, getting into an emerging field that is very important like Material Informatics would be veeeery hard without an academic setting. Even with CS… honesty I still disagree that academia doesn’t have a purpose or value. Just reading a good research papers recently, one of my favorite recent topics being new ways to discover spy cameras using smartphones. Also some of our greatest minds have received a lot of benefits from an academic environments. I understand bachelor degrees from a lot of places are overpriced and I agree that those seem like a trap and the value might be questionable.
> Any degree, by the time you have it, might be deprecated or eroded to the point is pointless.
My degree cost me out of pocket about ~$5k for my tuition. I stayed in state and my state had a program that paid for tuition if you made above 2.3 GPA in high school. That gave me new friends, sports clubs to join, and understanding of subjects early on that I still use today like psychology and finance. Not to mention my CS degree has paid me back in dividends and I still use knowledge from it today. I have maaany friends in the same boat as me.
> Education has to go the tutorial way or it will continue to decline.
Sounds like a version of tutorial hell potentially but on the job training has its place. AI, ML, game theory, cryptography, quantum computing, probabilistic methods, the list goes on for sincere that 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.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#60Someone 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,…
The author's argument was immediately diminished the moment it became obvious they had something to sell.