
Ask HN: How relevant are Master's degrees in tech today? - red_fox
I ask this question with interest from both from the perspective of a person with a non-cs undergraduate degree and one with.<p>Personally I have a degree in economic geology and am currently studying a Master of Finance but I have been programming on and off since school. Recently I have been considering exiting my finance masters with a grad dip&#x2F;cert (I am in Australia and am not sure if those quals mean anything anywhere else?) and pursuing some form of CS. For many working professionals and people who don’t happen to live near quality education institutions, I think that online learning is an excellent choice.<p>Unfortunately this severely limits the course options to both lengthy and costly master’s degrees through universities such as Georgia Tech, Penn State or Liverpool, or short specialisations through MOOC providers such as Udacity or MIT’s open courseware.<p>[TL;DR] Getting to my actual question. Do you think it is worth the cost (both in time and money) to pursue a Masters in CS through a traditional university or are building skills by completing personal projects and taking MOOC&#x27;s (such as Udacities nanodegrees) just as likely to arm you with the skills to land a job and make a meaningful contribution in the field.<p>Edit: Fixed my paragraph formatting.
======
hacknat
Most of the time you will hear this community downplay the importance of post-
graduate work in finding success in tech. This is true. You, by no means, need
a master degree to have a successful career, monetarily speaking, in tech.
However, If you want to work on problems beyond consumer applications or B2B
crud, working on serious technical problems (machine learning, compilers,
OSes, embedded, etc), then a Masters will certainly help. Do you _need_ it?
Probably not, but it isn't the resounding "No" that you hear when asking about
success in startups or the middle-ware teams of the big four.

------
a-saleh
As far as I have seen, the thing that in mostly gets you a job is that you
already had a similiar job somewhere else. The sentence for junior positions
is "completed bachelor's degree in CS/Software Engineering or at least 2 years
of work experience in field."

On the other hand, my two years of experience was "Sysadmin a server for a
local church." and only reason why my local church needed sysadmins was
because me and a friend of mine bought a server, collocated in a local ISP
that a third friend worked at and decided "Hey, our church could use a website
and we could be the sys-admins :-)"

To answer your question, I think the utility of Master in CS as well as
learning through MOOC's is dwarfed by anything you can present as "Somebody
already paid me money for a thing I did", if you want to primarily land a job.

When I thought about getting a master degree, I thought about these questions:

Do I see ever wanting to pursue some sort of academic career? I.e, get a phd,
desire to write papers on obscure topics, e.t.c. then definitely.

Do I want to learn things that require at least somewhat well furnished lab?
I.e. it is quite hard for MooC to offer a lab on side-channel attacks on
security cards or hands-on with sensor-array networks.

Do I want to learn the theory more in-depth and does physical classroom help
in this regard?

How does the cost compare? What do I get out of this credential-wise?

In my case I wanted to get masters in Information Security for these reasons:

1\. I already endured 2 semesters of algebra and I.S. was one of the few that
both interested me and would use the theory I have learned in BC

2\. yes, one day I might go back to school to crank out few papers just for
fun and the low probability of getting a proper academic title :)

3\. school did have a few nice security lab courses present

4\. having a course end with proper seated exam with lecturer present helps me
focus on studying

5\. I study in Czech republic, which means I have first 3 years of tuition
paid for by the state. (Even if I didn't it is under 1000E/semester).

------
dhruvkar
I got into an ME (Masters of Engineering) program after a non-CS degree and
working in the Industrial Engineering field.

I would say it was worth it for me, as I worked on FreeBSD servers to set up a
system for deploying experimental modules to test security measures. I had
zero experience with anything of that sort before.

I say find a professor willing to provide work (and pay) for your time in a
Master's degree and it's completely worth it.

------
g051051
You can try the Ga Tech OMSCS. It's fully online, is the same as the on campus
version, and costs about $8000.

~~~
red_fox
Thanks, yeah I have been looking at that option. I really like the course, the
content and especially the price. I just wonder if one could simply take most
of the free specialization courses on Udacity that are offered as part of that
course and have the same job prospects.

------
new_hackers
Can you get a accepted for a MS CS without at BS CS first?

