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The case against CS master’s degrees

ozwrites.com

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Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#81

Post by hacym »

It’s amusing to me how this article ended. It really discredits much of the author’s opinion.

I’m a self taught software developer that went back to school to learn the engineering aspects of what I’m doing. Boot camps and online tutorials like what the author appears to be selling teach you how to do a task. Higher education teaches you how to think, learn, and communicate at a higher level.

Do you learn how to build a React app? No. But anyone can go learn that on any of the thousands of websites that promise to turn you into a computer scientist in 6 weeks.

I fully enjoyed my experience in grad school, and wouldn’t trade it for anything. It might not have been the deciding factor in getting a job, but it sure as hell made me more confident.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#82

Post by jakear »

kache_ wrote: post #33
t_mann wrote: post #18

Someone 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. You mean, the same amount it would take to do it through a university program? I fundamentally don't believe the ma…

Yes, following along online can give you as much information as sitting silently in lectures and recitations and completing problem sets while sitting in isolation in your dorm room; but there’s way more to be learned by thoughtfully engaging in discussions with your professors, TA’s, and classmates. In fact I’d argue the bulk of my education came from the latter.

In short: Getting A’s at MIT is simple. Challenging yourself to challenge your colleagues is difficult. Not to mention all the labs.

As a corollary, I’d go on to argue everyone who paid full tuition for online classes during the pandemic got ripped off on a massive scale.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#83

Post by sirmoveon »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #80
sirmoveon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume quantum computers become mainstream or any other technological evolution? crazy to imagine I know, but that has been the tendency.

The tendency for a good 50 years is a Master's degree will return a significantly higher expected lifetime of earnings.

You make it into any exclusive club in society and you will also enjoy more benefits than the average person in society.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#84

Post by KingMachiavelli »

scoot wrote: post #78
Firmwarrior wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can get a stipend along with tuition forgiveness, so all you're really losing is $150k+/year in opportunity cost by goofing off in academia rather than working

Are you suggesting that the average postgrad salary is is $150K? If so, which planet?

He's saying a reasonable software developer salary is $150K which is likely true if someone is a software developer who is considering a masters program just for fun.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#85

Post by hacym »

muh_gradle wrote: post #26

Doing the OMSCS program for Georgia Tech and interviewers always comment on how that's impressive. It's a rigorous program, and I definitely think it's helped me grow as a developer.

It is impressive. Don’t let articles like this make you think it isn’t. Many people start it and can’t finish. Graduating is an accomplishment that should be celebrated.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#86

Post by cinntaile »

sirmoveon wrote: post #83
ChrisLomont wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tendency for a good 50 years is a Master's degree will return a significantly higher expected lifetime of earnings.

You make it into any exclusive club in society and you will also enjoy more benefits than the average person in society.

So... It's not declining?

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#87

Post by sgtnoodle »

drewg123 wrote: post #73

I have an undergrad from a large, anonymous state school, and a masters (earned in 1993) from a smaller, regionally prestigious private engineering school. I honestly don't believe that I learned anything useful when getting my MS. The upper level undergrad courses that I took at the state school were mixed grad/undergrad, and covered far more material than the ones at my grad school. I sailed through all the coursew…

I stuck around another year and got my masters. It was mainly an excuse to go on another solar car race. Even though I delayed getting a job a year, I suspect the masters degree got me more stock options than I would have gotten otherwise, and that stock turned out to be rather lucrative. My wealth of experiences from building embedded systems for solar race cars also played positively into entering the workforce.

The graduate level algorithms course I took was definitely interesting and helpful.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#89

Post by Hermitian909 »

sirmoveon wrote: post #83
ChrisLomont wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tendency for a good 50 years is a Master's degree will return a significantly higher expected lifetime of earnings.

You make it into any exclusive club in society and you will also enjoy more benefits than the average person in society.

In CS, a lot of the knowledge that is very valuable today was discovered years ago and is taught well in Master's programs. As a concrete example, I know some great database developers making >1 million a year because of their expertise. They tell me the vast majority of knowledge the apply at work was discovered in the 80s. They're up to date on newer stuff, but it's just not what gets used.

Could that all be invalidated by some new hype technology? Possibly, but even then it would be decades before these older systems are ripped out.

I think you're imagining a much more rapid change in technology than usually happens. Heck, I knew someone who's masters was focused on vacuum tubes and graduated the year the semi-conductor was invented. This was one of the more rapid seismic technical shifts in history and it still allowed him to have a long lucrative career with legacy systems. I wouldn't worry about CS knowledge being outdated anytime soon.

Re: The case against CS master’s degrees

#90

Post by majormajor »

There's an interesting sort of credentialism talked about here where an MS is seen as a negative signal.

The theory here is that this is because of people doing MSs without a good underground background knowledge, although even ten years ago I'd stopped being impressed by an MS on a lot of resumes for a different reason: continuing on to an MS was often easier than getting a top-tier job offer out of school, especially at lower-tier or international schools without big tech recruiting presences.

I was originally in a BS/MS combo, but I didn't complete the MS (guess that was a good move? huh), but I learned a lot of interesting things in the extra 8 classes I took. In a world where engineers are judged on "demonstrated abilities" (even if that's just whiteboarding in an interview) having that much more exposure to math, logic, stats, algos, and operating systems definitely gave me more breadth to do better on both interview + real world projects. So for ramping up your knowledge of solving "CS problems" it's great.

Note that the article here is a sales pitch for kinda the same thing: study the fundamentals, just pay (? i don't see anything about pricing on the Bradfield site) them instead. Left unanswered is what will keep this a reasonable option or a meaningful credential over time. If it stays super small, it's probably too low-profile for people to see it as valuable. If it scales, it probably breaks in the same way as traditional programs.

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