The case against CS master’s degrees

Lots 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/english degree + bootcamp for entry-level positions.

And this isn't just making presentations and writing documentation. It's making effective use of your time in standups. It's conversations about your future relationship with your employer. It's knowing how to ask the right questions to weed out bullshit when digging through other technical documentation respectfully. It's taking a bold new idea that entered your head and figuring out which way would be the best to envangelize it at your organization.

I think in an ideal case, a master's degree in a computing discipline hits the intersection between intense training on a subfield of computing that can be difficult to break into (e.g. statistical machine learning, robotics, formal methods, cryptography) and your demonstration of your "mastery" is taking a cutting edge concept in that subfield and demonstrating mastery through effective technical communication in the form of a project/thesis.

A master's degree isn't guaranteed to make you a "better" programmer, but I would really hope that it would make you much more familiar with the field, and also teach you how to take that familiarity and leverage it to become a more effective communicator.

My experience: The first two years of my CS PhD program, which overlapped significantly with the MSc program, were extremely engaging and pushed my intellectual boundaries much harder than OCW or any other online content.

Worth pointing out that both the author and the lead quote are selling alternatives, and neither have actually done a masters in CS.

I 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

This post seems light on any actual data between the difference on individuals who have a CS masters and not, and instead argues against getting one on a few aux points:

* Opportunity cost

* two tweets of HM saying they don't find it useful

* cs masters aren't geared towards non-cs college grad students

* professors don't know how to handle online teaching

* programs are cash cows (mentioning two non-top-cs programs)

To address the core point about whether those with a masters from a top CS program (say top 20) vs self-taught _on average_ do know more about programming, in my experience they do! Topics like how programs work (interpreted vs compiled languages, memory management), how a program talks to the OS and underlying hardware, and even topics on AI/ML and how to do deep learning. Whether that makes them better at their job depends on what their role is - if it's making a web application or working on underlying infrastructure in C.

So I guess to provide an alternative view to the author's, there are good online programs like UT Austin and Georgia Tech where students don't have to take time off work as they can do it at night / weekends, both programs are low-cost (~$10k), and do have professors who do understand online teaching. I think it's important to make sure you pick colleges and classes geared towards learning, not go with the intention of specific "job training", and likely you'll come out ahead having done it.