As someone who is 70% through Georgia Tech's OMSCS, I found very few compelling arguments in this essay.
The case against CS master’s degrees
91–100 of 134 posts
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 invali…
Academia will always try to teach the best way around a problem. So, you won't see academia, in an updated program, trying to teach these old ways, eventhough there's still going to be a market for legacy technology. They will usually be highly profitable for that same reason.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I used to have a bot that asked people every day if they needed help, then ask who they needed help from and what they were blocked with. That adds just enough push to force people into asking for help. If you’re using a standup as anything other than a pulse on making sure progress is possible. You failed.
As a manager, one has to manage many different personality types. Not all people are proactive in communicating that they need help or are lagging. The manager could go to each of his directs and ask these questions individually, but it is more efficient to do it as a group. The group setting also gives coworkers the opportunity to say, “oh, I know what’s going on. I can help with that.”
Stand ups do not have to happen every day. That’s where a lot of managers fail.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Assume quantum computers become mainstream or any other technological evolution? crazy to imagine I know, but that has been the tendency.
Quantum computers don't obsolete CS. They're a kind of coprocessor like GPUs and can't do most tasks faster than classical computers (or, actually, at all).
I did specialize in "AI" in undergrad a year before deep learning was discovered and so most of what I learned about genetic algorithms/K-means/MCMC turns out to be kind of useless, but oh well.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#95Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#96I think it should be noted that the Georgia Tech Online Master's in Computer Science (known as OMSCS) mentioned in the article costs about 7,000 USD, all-in for a 5-semester program. [1] This seems to me an amazing bargain for a Master's degree from a respected institution in the USA. [1] https://omscs.gatech.edu/prospective-students/faq
The article's argument against programs like OMSCS is that the only feedback is from teaching assistants. This claim is not true. There is (a) automated grading of programming assignments, so your program runs against unseen test cases, (b) informal feedback from TAs and other students on Slack and other unofficial channels, (c) formal feedback from other students as part of grades in certain classes and group projec…
I also completed the program. Some classes did better at feedback than others. But honestly, whats so bad about getting feedback from teaching assistants? The TA for Reinforcement Learning wrote the book Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning and has experience using RL in industry. If that is the worst they can say about OMSCS its sort of a pretty big endorsement.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#97Maybe 10 years ago I would have been impressed with any candidate with a masters from a legit CS department. However, in the last 5 years I've worked with numerous engineers with masters from both "prestigious" universities and also the typical "cash-cow" degrees that are so common today. One of my previous devs had a masters from a "public-ivy" in computer science, and he honestly was not qualified for anything more…
> ...pushed through the system due to his race and the need for these schools to fill diversity quotas...
> ...hordes of foreign students getting degrees from cash-cow programs in order to remain in the US...
Not saying that somewhere in there, a legitimate argument about the reduction in overall quality of candidates doesn't exist, but it does smell a bit of having a strong bias against minorities and foreigners. There is such a thing as confirmation bias, where a person interprets a situation through a negative ideology about others not of their ethnic group and where they are in a position to execute an agenda based on those beliefs.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Assume quantum computers become mainstream or any other technological evolution? crazy to imagine I know, but that has been the tendency.
Quantum computers still need programming. They still need to interface other hardware. Etc.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#99Doing 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.
Same here. Agreed.
Re: The case against CS master’s degrees
#100I've never understood paying for permission to claim you know something when it's a practical skill that you could simply demonstrate.