As someone currently mid-career in UT Austin’s part time MS in Software Engineering program, avoid this program. I got my undergrad from Georgia Tech 10 years ago, and Georgia Tech is better in every regard.
UT has this nice list online that they never truly offer - you have at most 3 courses to pick from each semester. And to finish in 2 years you have to take the summer course, which there is one class and no options to pick from. Last summer I took algorithms… probably one of the first CS courses you ever take. I have to take whatever classes are offered every semester to actually finish in 2 years.
The program is disorganized, with you not knowing what classes offered are till a month before registration. And the program scheduling is awful. It’s a Friday and Saturday once a month. It has consistently been on every 3-day weekend.
The program does nothing to accommodate full-time workers despite its description. The courses are re-packaged regular MS courses, complete with all the homework and office hours in the middle of the work day. Sometimes you’ll have projects that are awkwardly due, due to requiring information from lectures once a month. And you will spend time doing tedious projects - most of them are not well-designed to reinforce the course material and end up being busy work.
All in all, it’s not worth it. It has marginal value a few years out if you don’t have a CS undergrad, but it’s value drops quickly with every year of experience.
Also a UT Option III student, same as you. I too regret doing the program. It just feels like such a hassle and to your point it is extremely disorganized.
I will say certain instructors like Vijay Garg make the program feel worth it. You learn new material, read research papers, and have implementations around research papers. His courses were the reason I stuck around. I took his advanced algorithms and distributed systems courses which were great.
That's sad to hear. I'm in UT's online data science masters and I think it's great. They have some teething problems (we're the first cohort taking a lot of these classes), but it's all pretty minor stuff like delays in getting invoiced etc. We seem to have more choice in lectures than you do each semester, and we definitely don't have to spend particular days doing coursework on long weekends. Things have been pretty flexible for us so far at least. The most important thing for me is that there's enough material in there and that its reasonably advanced, so I feel like it's worth doing this one for sure.
Thanks for the heads up, was also considering this recently and their list of courses does look very interesting but also saw their schedule seemed pretty bare.
It’s stayed the same despite feedback. The professors have asked for feedback and have gotten a bit defensive when people overwhelmingly have said that the course load for particular courses is too high for working professionals.
I'm personally in the Georgia Tech Online Master's in Computer Science (OMSCS) program right now and can't say enough good things about it. The coursework is rigorous, deep, and varied, you really do learn quite a bit through the program and more than just random learning on your own, you get a degree out of it. Plus you get the opportunity to do some research and publish papers.
I have a more mixed experience with the OMSCS. Overall it's a good program, and if the choice is between Udemy or OMSCS then it wins hands down. For me the central issue is online vs. in-person.
Education is an interactive experience, the value of a good professor and classmates is helping to identify issues when you are stuck and nudge you just enough for you to connect the dots. As an undergraduate I liked attending study groups and office hours. I learned as much from my peers, both me helping them and them helping me, as I did from my professors. This spirit was difficult to replicate this in OMSCS.
The problem is that high tough, in-person communication is very effective but this doesn't "scale" well. I can only imagine how different the world would be if Plato was teaching online. :)
Also I was in the 2nd cohort, there were certainly a lot of "bugs" and issues they were working through. Additionally, the culture of video conference and zoom was also less a few years ago, which could make an impact.
I second this. I attended OMSCS for a few semesters and ultimately dropped out because I felt most of the courses lacked any interactive component. Another factor that led me to drop out was that one of my biggest reasons for enrolling in a masters degree was to strengthen my research skills. Although I did manage to do research in a couple of courses and assist a professor, I found it very hard to juggle research, a full-time job and the demands of a part-time OMSCS course load (which is very time-consuming due to lack of interaction with instructors and faculty since it requires a lot of autodidacticism). Right now I am trying to determine the next steps in my educational journey. I am taking some online extension course with a synchronous lecture component and am finding it a lot better for really learning the material than OMSCS courses without synchronous learning component. However, it doesn't seem like full masters programs are offered in this manner. Has anyone found such a program in Computer Science that is geared towards people who already have a bachelor's degree in CS and are working full time in industry.
If lack of peer interaction was your main hangup, I think it has been addressed. The OMSCS Slack workspace has become a kind of 24/7 office hours, study group environment.
But there is still little to no interaction with the professors.
The best part of my experience was trying to form a study group (Google Hangouts at the time). Most people dropped but I made a very good friend. We still stay in touch to this day.
Slack and other conferencing tools are game changers. People getting used to these tools is one silver lining to the pandemic.
Agreed, while I completely agree that in person is not the same as virtual, Slack makes it so that it's not as bad and I've made some good connections on slack. I check it every day and very much feel like I'm part of a community.
OMSCS alumni here. Almost all my classes had student organised study groups over video chat. But it does require you to seek them out and participate in class slack usually. Overall I had far more class related interaction than I did in my on campus undergrad.
I had near zero interaction in (physical) college regarding learning while we spent an awful lot of time on coursera dedicated irc rooms on (now dead) freenode, it was really vibrant, good spirit, no cheat, just sharing some hints at times, discussing the ideas. I preferred it to my IRL class memories.
I was in the second or third cohorts, and I dropped out during the first course because the assignment was to write their registration system for them for free. They had specific requirements for Java, MySQL, etc. If I'm going to work, I'm sure as hell not going to be paying to do it.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound credible. You wouldn't let potential newbies write an important part of your infra. Plus a credible school has more than enough software developers. Might it have been the other way around, that the people who actually wrote the system have designed assignments that are based on their experience? That's something I sometimes did when I held classes: nothing gets you closer to a realistic real-world practice problem than the one you just solved yourself
I created this account for a specific question because the subject is something I'm thinking of right now. My question is:
How much time do you invest every day on this degree?
I dropped out of my MS degree 20 years ago and would love to do that again, but I feel like I would only have (at most) 1 hour a day to work on it due to all my work and family commitments. I could squeeze an additional hour at work to learn but that's about it.
I'm almost done with my OMSCS run. An hour a day won't cut it.
Most people either do a couple hours an evening plus a chunk on weekends, or else dedicate most of their weekend. I tend to fall in the first camp, and then also add more weekend for harder classes.
The time commitment varies from 5-30 hours per week depending on the class. Most classes fall pretty close to 10 per week in my experience, but I also have been mostly picking medium difficulty classes on purpose.
Not sure how old your kids are but last time this topic came up I asked someone a similar question. My kids are both under 3 and they said no way if your kids are very young. I don’t think an hour would cut it unless you had a large part of Saturday you could spend time doing projects.
I'm sad to say that an hour a day is unlikely to let you finish the program productively. You can look at https://omscentral.com/courses for student's estimates of how long they spent per week in courses, but most are over 10 and quite a few 20-30. You can get through it by taking some easier courses, but it is like a second job in many ways.
It varies for me. I am a bit over half way through. I think I spend on average 10-20 hours a week doing work for the class. But I typically am the type to burn a weekend doing a project then do not much work for the next week.
I’m curious whether anyone here is doing/has done OMSCS with a family in addition to a day job. I would love to do the program, but I’m not sure how realistic it is to take it on with young kids in the house. Does all of your non-work time end up being consumed by coursework?
I just graduated from OMSCS and have four young kids and a full time job. It took me four years and I made full use of my employer’s generous continuing ed program (50 days/year, introduced about a year after I started) which kept after-hours work to a manageable level. I had to pass on a few good courses due to predicted workload, but made it through a good number of the harder/more rewarding ones and am very happy to have done it. I do not think I would have stuck with it if I was working 40 hours/week and doing the program entirely on my own time.
You can do one class per term, and even skip terms. You can alternate hard classes and easier classes. If you don’t rush, it’s doable.
Source: graduated from omscs last year, with two small kids and a full time job. Took 3.5y though, and I had to skip a couple of hard but interesting classes because they would have been too difficult given the situation (covid lockdowns with kids at home and increased job-related workload)
I did my degree online with a "day" job and young family. My kids were 6 and 3 at the time. But my job wasn't a 9-5 so I didn't have that burden. Also, it got to the point where the day after lectures were posted, which were around 9 pm to midnight, I would get up at 3:30 a.m. to watch a 3 hour lecture.
The old adage "where there is a will there is a way" is definitely true.
OMSCS alumni here. OMSCS is no joke! I underestimated the program and did it in a similar situation. I completed it, but it certainly had a large cost to me personally. You will lose weekends and time with your family - whether it's a massive project you're trying to complete before the deadline, or a hard final exam you need to study for 50 hours to pass.
If you can accept those sacrifices, and your partner is willing to support you (mine wasn't, it turned out), then it's worth considering. I would also strongly suggest treating it like a marathon, not a sprint, and do the 2 courses a year option.
I did in person MSCS with a day job and one kid, about 7 years old at the time. It's doable with a supportive spouse. I spent one or two hours (outside of class) a during the week, and sometimes more during the weekends.
I completed this at one class per semester, except for the semester I attempted two classes to speed up the process. While I was able to complete both classes, I felt the learning suffered as I was just rushing to complete assignments in time instead of really learning the material.
So there are a few ways now! I do agree that it's not the default, I'd probably say <5% of people do, but it does exist.
1. Courses -There are a number of courses now where you can create projects and publish papers. Again, not the default, but if you put in the effort it's doable. To name a few, Computing for Good, Big Data for Healthcare, Deep Learning, Educational Technology, Human-Computer Interaction and others.
2. VIPs! These I consider one of the "hidden" gems of OMSCS and what I personally did. You can see them here: https://www.vip.gatech.edu/ but basically instead of a class for a semester (but counts as a class for credit and graduation purposes) you work for a professor on a project with several other grads/undergrads. I did one this past semester and was asked to stay on as a research assistant over the summer doing work in NLP. Really excited for it actually and has been a fantastic opportunity. I put a lot more details here - https://redd.it/u6cj5z
3. Master's Project/Thesis - This is the option to do a Master's Project or thesis instead of just ten courses, but it does require more work from the student to find a professor and do that. There's many more details here https://redd.it/9t48b2 and frankly I wish I had done so, but too late now.
The problem is when you have paid the tuition, and finished the degree, it's so hard to objectively rate it.
I have a Bachelor's degree from a decent state school in California.
At the time, I felt the courses were too easy, and my four years were a bit of a waste of time.
I remember going to a graduation party, and you would think we graduated from med school. The graduates were carrying on like it was so rigrigrous. (I have a very, very average intellect too. I actually flunked kindergarten.)
To this day I will not denigrate the school in any way.
I use to feel contempt for people really proud of graduating college. The actual college courses were all pretty easy compared to the difficulties of the rest of life at the same time - caring for family members, scraping together rent, etc. Someone proud of graduating college when all they had to do in the 4 years was study was upsetting to me.
I have a more mature perspective now, you never know what struggles people have and the courses are really tough for a lot of people.
> I use to feel contempt for people really proud of graduating college. The actual college courses were all pretty easy compared to the difficulties of the rest of life at the same time - caring for family members, scraping together rent, etc. Someone proud of graduating college when all they had to do in the 4 years was study was upsetting to me.
>
> I have a more mature perspective now, you never know what struggles people have and the courses are really tough for a lot of people.
Well done on you! I occasionally run into past versions of you. They usually dismiss my BSc degree and my MSc degree with an attitude that is similar to:
"I learned real lessons at the school of hard knocks. While you were partying with your college friends and memorising useless theory, I was making ends meet and learning practical programming by actually doing it."
Truth is, I've never been to f/time university. After school I (very briefly) apprenticed as a auto mechanic for a short while, then left to work in a factory assembly-line (12-hour shifts, all night-shift, 7 days a week) for a little more peanuts than an apprenticeship paid.
I used almost all of my meagre income to pay for part-time university (work at night, study+sleep during the day). Halfway through my second-year courses I finally caught a break and got a job as a computer-lab assistant at a nearby university.
It wasn't actual programming work (show new students how to log in, refill printers with paper, help students who destroyed or lost their access cards, etc), but it left me a lot of free time to waste on usenet, which is where I found my first actual programming job.
I don't narrate my origin story to those past versions of yourself, though. There's no point. Their self-identity includes their own bootstrapping story about how degrees are pointless.
Out of curiosity, I found a sample kindergarten curriculum for the province of Ontario in Canada. [0]
Children as young as four in the province are evaluated by educators on (pages 306–308): the development of the ability to interpret and respond to basic communication, demonstrate independence and "self-motivation" in learning, giving and accepting constructive criticism, developing problem solving skills ("e.g. trial and error, checking and guessing, cross-checking), personal hygiene, self-control of emotions, assertiveness when feeling safe or uncomfortable, and other skills. Indicators that educators look for include phrases from children such as "I'm really frustrated" (page 161) as a demonstration as an awareness and ability to label emotions; "I put my vehicle on the shelf so it would be safe" (page 167) as evidence of problem-solving ability; and persistence in difficult games (e.g. card games and outdoor children's games).
I was also curious whether education in kindergarten could actually have a causal effect on improving long-term outcomes. I couldn't find an immediate conclusion on whether or not interventions are effective, but in at least one paper, it's treated as established knowledge that interventions work. From a quick search, a longitudinal study published in a paper called "Task-Oriented Kindergarten Behavior Pays Off in Later Childhood" [1] with 2837 participants showed a correlation between self-regulation skills in kindergarten and long-term outcomes. The researchers wrote that "early screening by teachers [in kindergarten] introduces the possibility of preventing future learning and behavioral difficulties." They also asserted that "classroom engagement is malleable and amenable to interventions."
While causality was not clearly established in this paper alone, it looks like a reasonable prediction from the correlation that improving classroom engagement as early as in kindergarten could plausibly lead to better life outcomes in years later in life.
TL;DR: While kindergarten in Ontario in recent years may have different expectations than the commenter's time in kindergarten, it appears that educators do evaluate young children on general life skills (e.g. self-control and ability to be aware and label emotions) as a screening tool, and also potentially for interventions to improve engagement in the classroom (which could plausibly lead to better outcomes in years later in life).
I did flunk Kindergarden. In the early 70's (during the later parts of the Vietnam war.), they had something called Early Primary in Corte Madera, Ca.
I remember all the children had to go up to the calendar on the blackboard once a month and put the day, date, and year The teacher would whisper in our ears where to put the plackard on the black board. If you failed--you had to do it the next day.
I just couldn't remember what she whispered in my ear while walking up to the calendar on the chalk board. Looking back it was nerves. We just had to move the pre printed plackard to the right spot.
The children used to yell "right--left. I would go to 30-31 places until they clapped. (The kids were on my side. They wanted me to succeed.
I was frozen with embarrassment though.
I think I had some learning disability, or emotional problem.
I just remember I had a hard time learning. In all honestly, I just wanted hide in the playhouse from the other children. I was basically very shy, and nervious.
That's when they put me in Early Primary.
It didn't bother me because 1/3 of the class was with me.
My family moved two years later to San Anselmo.
I was happy. My father, and mother were happy. My dad bought a four bedroom home. We all had our bedrooms. I love life, but my family more.
When I entered 2nd grade, I became worried. These new kids had no problem answering questions the teacher would ask.
I------would just cower in fear hoping she would ask me anything. Well--she didn't overlook me, and I would just freeze in fear when she would ask me to repeat what she just said. (Looking back it was basically nerves, but maybe a learning problem? 99.99% of me now feels it was just nerves.
Ok--it's the 70's, and teacher, and my mom, had an unusually long conference.
They held me back again. They put me in this worthless Speech class. I was a studder. "A, E, I, O, U, any Y." Repeated in a route manner. It made no sence to my young self.
I did have a younger sister whom would remind Everone that we were three years apart in age, but 1 year apart in school. There was always a silence from intelligent adults, or an uncomfortable silence from the rest.
By the time I got to the 3rd grade, I knew I just could be held back again.
By the time I was in 7th grade, I was a B to A student. Everything just clicked in.
High school seemed easy, but it was only until my last year I took it serious.
Most blue collar kids knew nothing about good/bad colleges. My sister, and myself, knew nothing of the SAT. It probally didn't help that my Electrican father thought "College boys were tax dodgers." (It was a different time in America. If you didn't go to college, it didn't matter. A union job was a test away.
OK, Iloved my father, but didn't want his life, including the drinking, and Archie Bunker mentality.
I ended up working my junior year in highschool, and going to College of Marin. Back then it was called the Little Berkeley. It was a great school for many years. Those two years were with the cost!
I wanted to become a doctor for all the wrong reasons, basically I could memorize visually all those biology charts, and organic reactions. It just came so easily.
I needed a 4 year degree though. I went to --- ------- state for the four year degree, and graduated. I also had a very aggressive girlfriend at the time, and I knew she would hold it against me if I graduate from that joke of a school.
I had a panic attack while I was in graduate school on december 24th. It was probally comming. I was very much a hypochondriac at the time, and actually believed I has a brain tumor. I tried to go back to school every month for a year, but was just a neurotic mess. I went from being the most capable guy in the room to not being able to drive a car.
I was so neurotic. My girlfriend was a saint though. I had this period where I though sex was making my head pain worse.
We are talking about a 19 blond virgin until we became a couple. She believed my bullshit until she saw a Woody Allen movie with her mother. I belive it was Hanna, and her Sisters.
All I knew was I had this head pain, and life seemed to short. I had a hard time repressing my sexual desires. I had a hard time sitting in school--delaying gratification. I did know that the worst day in college was better than any job blue collar jobs though.
(Why did I write this? I use HN as. journal. My respect for this site has dwindled. When Dang isn't hellbanning me for no reason------I will write. It's not for anyone's benefit except myself, unless it comes to real subjects. I am not going to edit this, especially after a bottle of wine.)
Oh agreed, and and I'm definitely biased towards my degree. What I can say is that without the degree I find it extremely unlikely I would have gotten the job I have now working in Data. At the least it gave me the confidence to apply, but also without the structure of the program, I would never have studied ML the way I have.
However, I do completely agree there are other great programs out there. UIUC and UTexas have great online MSCS degrees that are comparable and well worth considering.
The coursework in OMSCS can vary. There are ways to get through the program taking fairly "easy" courses, and then there are much harder ones. I have certainly had a class or two that was less useful to take than others, but that was mostly so I could graduate in 10 semesters as opposed to taking longer.
I view university education as poor-to-useless vocational training for software engineering as well as most if not all careers that aren't explicitly research-focused, and I say that as someone who's gotten a master's degree in computer science, intended to get a PhD, and for the most part didn't for financial reasons. I really enjoy and respect academia, but it exists to train researchers, and the more advanced a degree you get, the more clearly that's their top priority and competency. A university simply isn't focused on building you job-relevant skills, and while you'll likely learn some incidentally there, there are much more efficient ways to do so. (For software, think code bootcamps, workshops and conferences, hackathons, mentorship from local communities of software engs, or even just autodidacting with internet resources and a fun project you came up with). That said, you can definitely leverage a master's program to get some in-depth specialization, build confidence as a researcher (Which some software orgs do like to hire), and sometimes the credential really will work in your favor. As long as that's true, it could end up worth it in terms of career advancement, but it could just as easily not at all. Personally, I think it's worth it anyway, but that's only because I intrinsically value educating myself, and find myself often wanting to move in a research-focused direction.
I agree with some of the premise —- university education doesn’t focus on preparation for specific vocational skills.
But you could say the same about high school. It doesn’t follow that reading writing and algebra are bad vocational investments, in fact the opposite because they support many possible vocations.
As a CS professor, my goal is to push students to rewire their brains in ways that are better and more effective. It is also for them to gain foundational understanding that will allow them to learn advanced vocational skills. I teach theory so software engineering may be different. But of course I don’t want to teach something that will mainly be useful only for the next 2-3 years of their career, I want to have an impact on the next 20-30.
So teach them the importance of testing, code review, and design documents. As someone who graduated 15 years ago, I feel like the only two truly useful things I got out of my CS degree were 1) lots of practice writing code and 2) my algorithms and data structures class. The latter was useful in exactly the way you hope for, but it was the only such class.
I often find it fascinating how worthless new grads view their university educations. We'd be vastly more underequipped to analyze and solve even the most basic problems without the rigid time pressure allowances university grants us. As a corollary, (and albeit rare), would you rather be pulled over by a police officer with an undergrad in law or one with three months of boot camp training?
That's how I do it, too. I give students a script which compiles their code with the test code (which is provided to them, if they want to look at it) and then runs it inside GDB (in case it segfaults or throws an exception). All of the tests are documented and, on failure, print an error message describing what was expected, what was actually returned, and include a URL linking to a fuller description of what might be going on.
In the future I'm hoping to run their tests inside Valgrind to check for memory leaks, enable the various sanitizers, etc., and I also need to figure out a way to check for conformance with my code formatting standard, but for right now it gives students perfect knowledge of what their grade will be when they submit.
I’m a student and in our CS department professors can test our code with valgrind and for formatting with Gradescope. I’m not sure how it works in practice but it’s an option if you are interested.
I thought my CS education at UC Davis was pretty worthwhile. Just learning C and C++ in those two intro courses was really useful for understanding everything built on top of those in a modern stack. The seams show all the time.
That said, I spent a lot of time building extracurricular websites in my spare time, which was also a huge leg up in my future career.
I do say the same about high school, and would also argue that mandatory education as a whole is a massive failure except as a means to babysit small children and eventually give them an opportunity to socialize, something which could also be done more effectively without the enormous apparatus of laws, policies, and folk beliefs we have built around what it's supposed to do and how that can be done
I'm currently in a master's degree in data science and I haven't really felt like what you said was happening; we were taught just the right amount of theory (how things like backpropagation, PCA, statistics, optimization work) but more advanced techniques were described only briefly, just so we could understand how to use them in our assignments, which makes sense given the little time there is. There was much emphasis on making use of a wide variety of techniques in practical scenarios.
I think a big difference here is program scope. A data science program is directly applicable to data science career because the scope of the program is very narrow. Whereas a computer science program is going to cover a good bit of material that is not directly applicable to a software engineering career.
I would argue a data science degree is less a Computer Science degree and more Mathematics degree. Programming is simply a tool. The real meat of it is the maths.
this is dangerously reductive and needlessly pessimistic.
The power of a university education is on several levels. One is the community of peers that you are part of. Second is the ability to learn what you need to and to learn what the limits of your knowledge are. Tech changes quickly and no university syllabus will ever be fully up to date. Besides, that is never their goal. Third is to to provide a safe environment to try and fail. Finally, a university degree is a basic filter. Completing a degree shows an ability to learn new things, be tested and demonstrate a decent understanding. You may fault the methods or the result but the process is effective and no, bootcamps or community work are not a substitute.
A university is not all about research but research is an extremely important skill to have. it manifests in ways that you may not imagine at the time.
I'm not sure we live on the same planet. In my previous job, my manager recruited a guy who was allowed to learn kubernetes on the job for 4 months (paid full time). Literraly this guy used to come to work and start completing exercises to learn only. That was his main task!!
It is incredibly stressful environment cuz if you fail then youll have to spend more time (so less vacations), maybe even pay some $$ or at worst have to take course again
Failure on a single assignment at university will not get you fired. Your team will not blackball you as incompetent. (Well, they might be upset but the next course you will probably be with other people.)
There is time to learn that your habits need to be changed in order to be successful in the long-term.
There is more support for investigating things that you think are worth investigating, and there can be positive reinforcement that some people find meaningful (e.g., repsect for presenting at student conferences) instead of "just" a paycheck.
University certainly provides a way to establish your credibility and build a portfolio that can be broader than $dayjob gives you the opportunity to do.
At the university there is very easy access to people with a very broad skill set. No need to beg HR to allow you to hire an ML specialist... just go down the hall and talk to Professor X.
It's not perfect, and not everyone makes as much of it as they could, but there are big plusses to the university system.
>There is more support for investigating things that you think are worth investigating,
In my world there was always lack of time cuz other courses wanted their important^tm projects too, so instead of deep dive into fancy topics that was just pass and move on and learn it yourself
In hs i liked math, in higher edu institution i had no time for it
I've gone and gotten a mid-career masters (or five). I went because I needed the self-validation. Terrible impostor syndrome.
I carefully evaluted every programme. I spent probably a year or two looking at different programmes, not through analysis paralysis, but because I was looking for programmes that had things that interested me and weren't either simply a shake-down for money or getting lost in proofs and theorems. I do better with project based work that builds up, rather than term papers and exams, which I am terrible at. I know myself, so I picked appopriately. My wife is the complete opposite.
My focus for picking a programme is always "show, don't tell" when it comes to "how do I demonstrate my knowledge in this subject." It is what works for me. Pick what works for you.
There are a lot of good master's programmes out there, but you really have to do your due diligence and not just rely on some website that screams "100 best online master's degrees!1!"
Look in to Open Classrooms, Thomas Edison, Structuralia, and several others just as a starting point. Don't get lost in the rigid academic weeds of North America. There's an entire world out there to explore.
It comes down to "are you looking for academic rigor that leads to more academic qualifcations later" or "are you looking for an education that will serve your professional needs." Most programmes are the former, and few are the latter.
I spent about $10,000 on my most expensive one. I spent 3K on my cheapest one. There was no difference between them in terms of what I got out of them.
I'm currently looking into this area (for similar reasons as you :)), these weren't on my radar at all. I'm EU based and flexible in what I'm looking for so they sound appealing. I'm curious what the "several others" you refer to are? I want to look into those too
That's quite amazing! For Open Classroom s, my impression is that it is more like Coursera or Udacity and not a "real" degree? I also recall the same thing with Structuralia and the Titulo Propio
It depends on the programme you study. Structuralia hands out mostly EQF 7, but backed by a number of Spanish universities that are wholly recognized by the government, and also several British universities. There may be other universities and countries they are working with, but those are the only ones I know of. These are "Master's diplomas", for all intents a Master's degree without thesis, I have a couple of those.
OpenClassrooms also does EQF 6 (Bachelor's) and EQF 7 (Master's) diplomas, some of them are backed by Universities in France (Ecole de Management, Central Supelec, and others), and again, may be a degree or may be a diploma - but if it is a degree or diploma backed by a University with a charter, then it is a real qualification. Same goes for Structuralia. You need to check the programme. At the end of the day, if you have an EQF 6 (Baccalaureate) or EQF 7 (Master's), and it is underwritten by a university with a charter, you're golden. It only matters if you need the thesis for going on to a terminal degree (and even then) or want to be in academia. I don't. I'll take the five master's and be happy with it. If you do any of those courses, you're still going to get put through the wringer, it ain't a walk in the park. I'd say the AI one, though easy because I knew the subject pretty well, was the hardest because I really stretched far beyond what I had grown comfortable with.
I have studied at nine different European universities/colleges at various levels, one in Asia, and four in the US. I feel I got value out of all the education (except that one MBA with a concentration in HR that I absolutely hated), but I prefer the European system most.
Footnote: When my wife mentions my qualifications in conversation, I correct her and say "two master's degrees, three master's diplomas." I still have that conscious bias myself. But every time I check the paperwork and every university I've shown them too for my next educational step, the university has come back with "that'll do nicely. These look good." It's that impostor syndrome kicking in again.
And one more thing...
Bachelor's and Master's with and without thesis doesn't delineate degree or diploma. It comes down to how the certificate is awarded, not what you had to do to get it. My Master's degree in Computer Science was a "without thesis option." Education above grade-school gets muddy, which is why you need to do research on the subject.
Thank you for your reply. That's quite impressive, I've rarely ever come across someone who has studied at that many schools across so many continents! Do any of the programs you've studied at offer Bachelors in CS or Linguistics? That's what I would need first, unless there is a program to go straight through to the Master's.
I would need to pull up my notes but Univeristy of Kent, University of Sheffield, Open University, Thomas Edison, and Open Classrooms all offer CS degrees that are recognized. Again, do your own research. Sheffield and Thomas Edison both offer Master's for educated professionals without a Bachelor's. You generally have to write out a bunch of statements on why you are qualified to enroll.
You can earn an entire Bachelor's by testing out and/or doing prior learning assessements (I've thought about that if I could find a subject that interested me). PLA acceptance is far more prevalent in Europe than in the US, though Thomas Edison in US does let you test out or do PLA for the entire degree if you are capable of it. I'll point out that doing PLA is not a walk in the park. I've done a couple of prior learning assessments where I felt I knew the class subject really well - it was probably more work to do the assessment (lots of writing and gathering of research notes and documentation) than it would have been to just finish up the prescribed projects.
I am no expert in any of this, and I strongly recommend you do your own research.
Also did OMSCS. Highly recommend it. The problem with self-learning is that sometimes you convince yourself that you understand something when you really don't.
Only when you get smacked by an exam or an assignment you realize that you've been fooling yourself.
The ML and Systems track is pretty hardcore. If you survive those you have pretty good foundational knowledge.
Fair warning though - the program is not a joke. Georgia Tech always leans towards application. You will spend a lot of time writing code and tinkering, but it's worth it if you want to learn a ton.
One reservation I have when I read about these MS programs is that they often sound like they will be heavy on group work. I see where that is valuable to prepare people just starting off in their career, but as someone who has been doing "group work" for the past 10 years irl, I'm not really interested in the mock UN version of having a day job.
Have your classes been built around group projects, or can you go it alone if you're doing it for kicks? I'd love to spend some time studying CS and end up with something to show for it, but I'm not interested in group-work-as-workplace-prep.
The only time I did group work was for the Deep Learning class (2-4 people) and my group members were excellent. Other than that one, no group work for me.
The key is to pick classes that are hard, and form groups early. People that reach out earlier usually have their shit together.
Current OMSCS student here (4 classes down, 6 to go). I'll second this comment, so far I've been impressed with the program. It's definitely rigorous, but I've already learned a lot.
There was a post on bigtech salary levels recently. Each promotion was equivalent to $100k or more, there were many levels. Hiring into a director position might double it. A degree makes these things substantially more likely. He'll probably have his money back within six months.
>> A degree makes these things substantially more likely.
There is a bit of a leap from more likely on a low probability event to probably will pay off their debt.
Getting promoted at a Faang company takes a good bit of work. Becoming a director is not something most people can expect. I’ve never heard of a promo committee at a Faang Corp take a degree into consideration and I’ve known plenty of director level people at faang companies who had no grad degree. If the person learns some useful new skills that could open doors. The credential might also help open some doors that an obscure college would not. But saying they are likely to make it back in 6 months is a bit of a stretch.
Budget was under $50k, which you can make in a few months at a tech job. Nice raise will pay for that nicely in no time.
If you don't think a lot of places aren't gatekeeping on degrees, you haven't looked at many.
To be more clear for folks that think it is an absolute filter, of course it is not. I remember about half of hiring pipelines ending on that point last time I was looking. Was 100% of the top companies with too many applicants however.
There are places that gatekeep on degrees as in "you must have a Bachelor's degree" or even "you must have a B.S. in Computer Science", but there are almost none that are gatekeeping on graduate degrees. I've worked at several FAANG-tier corporations, have friends at all of the others, and have interacted with all sorts of smaller companies. I can count on one hand the number of people I've worked with with graduate degrees, and all of them had their base degree in something other than computer science.
Correct for IC jobs. When you want to move up thru the "glass ceiling" to make the real money, guess who they'll pick of two similar candidates? The one with the better degree.
I'm really not convinced. I looked, and examples of my reporting chain at various points in my career:
Company A: Lead (yes, but undergrad in EE), Manager (no), GM (no), VP (?), SVP (no), President (yes), CEO (dropped out of MBA)
Company B: Lead (no), Manager (yes), Director (?), Senior Director (no), Senior Director (yes), VP (no), SVP (MBA), CEO (yes)
The plural of anecdote is not data, and I'm not a director, but a cursory comparison of senior leadership and LinkedIn doesn't leave me convinced that a graduate degree matters. Most of the folks who have one got one back in the 90s where things were very different.
This one says 400k+ higher lifetime earnings with "advanced degree". The source from georgetown says they are less likely to loser their job in a recession as well.
No, the real world is not black and white and this is not a guarrantee. But, get an advanced degree looks like an easy power-up at the prices OP was willing to pay.
> If you don't think a lot of places aren't gatekeeping on degrees, you haven't looked at many.
I can only think of aerospace, and other engineering-not-software companies that do this. They also don’t pay sw developers much to begin with, so this looks like a very false economy.
I'm just one data point, but having done an MSCS (in person at UT Arlington) I agree - I have no reason to believe that I wouldn't still be in the same place now if I'd skipped it. I was fortunate that my then-employer paid for it, so it was no cost to me and I'm glad I did it, but I'm pretty sure that every job I've gotten since would have been available to me with just my Bachelor's degree. In fact, this recruiter: https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-compu... insists that Master's degree holders are less competent than BS degree holders.
OTOH, UT Arlington is no Stanford, so maybe it's worth it if you can get into one of the top 10 or so programs in the country.
Hold on a second though, I read that certain job levels get skipped if you have a masters or a phd for some companies when hiring. For where the field of study matches the company wouldn't that be quite valuable? Also cost of a masters where I live (Canada) is a lot less than America, but maybe comparable to Europe?
> I read that certain job levels get skipped if you have a masters or a phd for some companies when hiring
That only applies for very early career. You get to skip one to two of the most junior levels in the company. By mid career, there is no skipping anymore
Don't the various corporate pure-ish research labs require a masters these days? The ones that may or may not work on things that turned into products? Or do the need a PhD ?
I can see a lot of people wanting the job of "play with cool toys and don't be responsible for products", especially as a mid-career transition.
Hey Evan, I know for a fact that big tech companies like Google or Meta will hire you without a CS master's degree. If it weren't for a hiring freeze at Meta right now I'd give you a referral. There's no reason for you to expend time and money on a useless credential unless you really really just want to learn the material.
I have a master's degree in software engineering. I honestly never felt that the two years to do my master's degree added much on top of my bachelor's degree that I couldn't just as well have learnt in two years of working in the industry instead. To be fair, I think the content of my bachelor's degree was quite good, setting me up with a foundational understanding of algorithmics, program analysis, interpreters, processors, AI (no ML, this was pre-deep-learning), concurrency, networking and linear algebra (and probably other topics that I don't even think of, but just take for granted). There's a bunch of things like that, where I think fully self-taught coders might tend to miss out on a depth of knowledge that can be useful as a foundation in your understanding of computing. But setting up that foundation doesn't need to take more than a couple years at most, and after that it's much more important to learn the trade, the tools, the techniques, the best practices, that a real-world programing job is the best way to learn.
So at the end of the day, whether a master's degree is worth it, I think depends on whether you've got a good enough foundation already - if you have that (from a bachelor's degree or otherwise) then a master's degree only really makes sense if you want your career to target the kinds of companies (typically enterprise) where where there's a bias toward promoting mostly people with master's degrees.
In OPs example, they have a bachelor's degree in physics, so I think it makes sense to add a couple years of computer science on top.
The major hurdle in a Master's degree is the thesis. Spending half a year writing and defending a scientific work requires and trains skills that are usually not acquired in the industry. Master's degrees that do not require a thesis defense are imo not really "master's" degrees since the student has not demonstrated "mastery" over any particular subject.
I studied for my MSc in the UK mid-career. I didn't really do it for the potential payrise (there is/was none), I just did it because I enjoy learning about computing and wanted to do something structured so that I stuck with it. It cost me about £10,000 and I paid monthly over the 2 years so it wasn't so bad financially. I think you can take a loan in the UK to cover postgrad stuff, but I didn't bother, I was in the fortunate position that I could afford not to.
> I didn't really do it for the potential payrise (there is/was none)
In many places it's a matter of employability. Without a degree, you are simply not employable (or promotable) unless you have the right network.
Discussing the relevance of the contents of a master's is like discussing the relevance of leetcode. At no point does anyone, either from the university or industry, claim the contents are relevant to the job. It's also why many degrees are effectively interchangeable as long as they are similarly prestigious.
I think mid-career degrees can have the effect short-circuiting the elitism.
I did the same! It fitted well with a career break I wanted to take, and it's been helpful in rounding out some of the more theoretical parts of my knowledge. I suspect it's viewed positively by some employers for some roles, but mostly not as positively as staying in a job for the two years instead. Not everything has to be viewed purely as a career investment though.
This is an interesting take. I find CS to be a beautiful subject that I've enjoyed studying in my free time, and would probably enjoy it even more if I really delved into it. But I have a hard time justifying the time and cost. The key question: would it make me a more effective software engineer?
I've been in the industry for many, many years now, and the work I do has a small amount of overlap with the contents of a CS degree. But a lot of software engineering in the real world exists "above" the layer that CS teaches, not unlike CS living above electrical engineering. On top of that, in general, soft skills seem to matter so much more than having 10-30% more hard skills. This varies with your position of course, but I'd wager that the majority of software engineering positions are like this.
Having a credential from a decent school might help get more compensation, but without being able to truly quantify the amount of "help" it gives, it becomes impossible to adequately quantify the ROI.
And sure, you'll see some job postings from time to time that say they "prefer a masters degree," but what about once you're in the door? I don't think I've ever heard a software engineer explicitly put much weight onto the educational credentials of a peer. There may be unconscious biases, but for most engineers, it's about producing results.
Where would a masters degree in CS help for someone with 20+ years of software experience? Genuinely - I have no clue.
I don’t have a masters. I’ll likely never need one. If there was a specific field that required intense learning and was cutting edge (computer vision or something) then I’d understand a masters (or especially a PhD) but for general work…? Don’t get it.
You’d certainly be better off financially from doing more leetcode or system design prep instead.
Unless it's for something specialized (CV, machine learning, etc.) then an advanced degree doesn't seem likely to help, career-wise. For personal growth, sure. But it probably won't open much up or affect your pay.
I've done almost all of my learning either on the job, or through extracurricular reading (e.g., lots of conference proceedings, and textbooks on interesting subjects). If you read just one paper a week, that's 500 papers in a decade, and you'll have a good grounding in large swathes of CS (or at least you'll know where to go for ideas on hard problems). Two papers a week and you will be wise beyond human measure.
I dropped out of college 40 years ago and the lack of a degree has never been a problem. It's getting that first job that's probably the biggest hurdle; after 4-5 years, few companies will care. And if they care, you may not want to work there.
The problem is most Masters programs don’t give you much expertise. Ever tried depending on someone’s skill in a topic they have a Masters in? Real crapshoot.
To who though? A lot of people won’t care if your masters is in education if you’re gonna work in most fintech.
I think it pigeonholes you further if you go down this route. If you want that then go for it but I’ve seen many wasted masters and PhDs in Silicon Valley. Many.
I did my MS in CS roughly twenty years after my BS. I can’t prove causality, but my pay went up about 25% with my first job after graduating, and it’s only gone up since. I found that the coursework re-kindled an abiding interest in the “science” in “computer science”, which may not always have direct application in my day job (Sr. SDE at Amazon; opinions my own, etc.), but is gratifying nonetheless.
I mean - were you working at companies like Amazon before..? That's gonna influence it a lot more heavily than anything else. You can certainly get a job at FAANG without having a Master's degree.
I was not. My coursework did require me to understand things like algorithms and Big-O notation much better than I had as an undergrad, so I think I was better prepared for Amazon's interview. I also think the degree made me more attractive to ThoughtWorks, which was my first job after graduating with my MS, and the experience I got working there helped prepare me for (eventual) success at Amazon. Again, I don't consider any of this causal; it's just how it happened to work out for me.
I've seen requirements for a master's in CS or related disciplines on job descriptions for technical leadership roles, mostly at larger, older, more conservative organisations.
My work experience gets me roles as director of eng, vp eng or CTO at most startups, but for the national rail company here in Canada, I have a hard time getting considered for any jobs.
For two cents, I’ve been in leadership roles (VP, or VP-equiv) at three big/huge companies now (Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft) and I don’t even have a Bachelors degree. This is somewhat unusual but not a one-off by far.
Job descriptions often say “or equivalent experience” (meaning professional experience) and in probably 1-2 cases during my career, a requirement to have a degree with no “or” clause included still hasn’t been a huge issue.
Impressed with all the research you did here and and your being intentional about objectives and how to get there, good luck!
My experience is identical. I’ve worked for people with no degree, and, outside of my friend group, I have no idea of the formal credentials of most of my peers.
I’ve hired folks at all levels. Degrees are one data point among many when I decide to interview a candidate, rarely discussed when making a hiring decision, and _never_ a factor when making a promotion decision.
If considering formal education to unlock promotion, I would strongly suggest speaking with one or two people with recent, direct experience in the promotion process at your institution. Get familiar with the functional reality of the process (it’s usually more subjective than advertised), ask how credentials are used (they usually aren’t), then go from there.
I will say that I have required education as evidence of commitment when considering applicants who were looking to change careers (that is, I see you have had success in your current role, but go get a cert to demonstrate basic aptitude and show me you are serious about doing this). This was only relevant for the most junior, entry level positions.
As an aside, I’m currently pursuing a teaching credential through WGU, but I have zero expectation that it will provide additional income (quite the reverse!) Rather, I’m pursuing the credential as a forcing function to engage with topics outside of my professional experience, and to provide access to opportunities that are actually formally, legally gated by credentials (teaching in public school in California).
I recently gave up trying to get a masters (because I couldn't get admission to any program), but I wanted to get one because I wanted to work in research and development. Work on kind of out-there problems. To get hired to do something like that... to even get past the HR screening... you need at least a masters degree pretty much anywhere.
If you don't have a goal like that, and you already have that level of experience, I agree it's dubious what a masters would do for you.
In your case only if there's a topic you'd like to spend your time researching and writing a thesis on. Doesn't have to be cutting edge though, there's plenty of value in iterative improvements.
Take it this way: two candidates for the same position. Both have +20 years of experience. Both pass the coding interview just fine. All things being equal, the only difference is that one candidate has a bachelor and masters degree in computer science but the other doesn't. I know who I would choose.
If you decide to go part time / start teaching at the local community college, then the accreditation agencies are starting to require a Masters to teach undergraduate courses. Experience doesn't seem to matter.
Off topic, but the fact that three schools are tied for #2 and three more tied for #6 in these grad school rankings (and FIVE tied for #11) strikes me as a hilarious commentary on the arbitrariness of these rankings. Like, if you weren't fudging the numbers some, but were trying to come up with real scores, you'd have that many exact ties?
I think the author did the right thing here: pick an arbitrary cutoff like top 20, and assume that within that bucket they’re all pretty good, without worrying too much about the specific ranking of each school.
This is fine. Ties just mean that the scoring has fairly low resolution. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Heck, "close enough to call them tied" may be a better representation of reality than trying to separate them by a third or fourth decimal digit.
The top 3 items on your list seem to be about prestige/status. I imagine you're thinking about buying that.
If so then I understand - if you've seen other people getting promoted and wondered about whether it was the extra qualifications. I am not really sure at the moment. I used to think that way and then I got a promotion which was nothing special to anyone except me - to me it was a huge breakthrough. It was not just because of my personal performance but about how extremely useful I was to my boss at the time and because he had another problem to solve which he thought he could put me onto. In other words it was all circumstances that mattered. To be fair, it is also because he is probably the best manager I've had so far (he thinks that hiring people who are nice is more important than anything).
Before my mini step-up I had been in companies where either the source of all solutions was always expected to come from outside i.e. we were to be soldiers without initiative or situations where other, better connected people were in the view of the management. There wasn't any chance for the people 2-3 levels above to form any opinions of you and the person directly above you was basically a competitor. I'm not joking that "the smokers," who had to leave the building to get their fix, was the most important clique to belong to at one place because people of all levels mixed there and got to know each other.
To get back to your Masters, I think it's a heavy investment for someone whose top concern is advancement/prestige. It feels a bit not right that the things that you want to learn about aren't at the top.
It might be that you will do all this work on learning things you're not really that interested in when it could turn out that the real problem is that you're just not working at a place where the conditions are right to show your usefulness and/or you don't have good management above you.
In the end I didn't do any of them because they're less productive than self-teaching (basically YouTube + Kaggle + real personal projects), and I don't value the CV cred highly.
> Even if nobody else noticed or cared about that one line on my resume, I think I would notice, and that would make a difference. Just in terms of self-confidence
This is the most important line in the article. Perhaps that’s part of being “mid career” but that’s an excellent level of self awareness and shows that there are multiple upside/benefits.
I did my masters of Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania mid career. It was the best career decision I ever made. Prior, no company would give me the time of day - couldn't get a phone screen. My TC prior was 60k, and doubled a few weeks after graduation. Doubled again within a few years. I was going no where, maybe some don't need it, but I did.
Was it hard? extremely. a lot of concepts were very old in my memory, but it was also a lot of fun. I enjoyed going to class every day.
Does anyone have experience with the step down from this? I have zero formal CS education but two decades of experience at pretty much all types of development. I live within spitting distance of my local state university (UNH) and don’t really care about any piece of paper, but I would love to take formal/ hard CS classes, whether for credit or audit. Is there a “right” way of doing this? Does it make any sense?
I taught my spouse to program when she decided to change fields, and did a similar thing where she wanted to master the advanced stuff by taking classes (she took them for credit on the off chance she needed it in a masters program) The classes she took were equivalent to three classes majormajor suggests:
Data Structures and Introduction to Algorithms: everyone needs this and it is maybe 50% of leet code problems
Assembly Language Programming and Machine Organization, Introduction to the Theory of Computation: this is the low level of how computers really work
Operating System Fundamentals: concurrency programming plus a lot more useful stuff
A standard Introduction DSA course will generally not cover advanced DSA stuff like segment trees or Heavy-light decomposition, or theoretical stuff like number theory, or computational geometry all that stuff you would find in the competitive programming space.
> segment trees or Heavy-light decomposition, or theoretical stuff like number theory, or computational geometry
I am not sure if there are any problems on leetcode that require any of these, but based on a sample of a few of their contests, if they exist they are a very small fraction (<<50%) of all problems.
I do CP on various sites so I don't know if it's for Leetcode in particular. But some companies like Salesforce or DE Shaw or Codenation do include advanced problems on their tests.
Are there companies that ask a lot of leetcode bards in their interviews? That seems like overkill even for FAANGs though I can see why some groups might do so purely to filter by Math ability/interest.
I think I know more about interview questions then leet prep, but I find the remaining 50% is specific to the job but in the same vein as data structures and algorithms. So in game programming maybe it is a path finding problem or 3d math hit detection. In backend it’s an algorithm about network flow or caching. Still data structures, but more practical for the role!
The school where I earned my CS masters required those with non-CS undergrad degrees (like myself with a BS in a hard engineering field) to take 12 semester credits of additional coursework to make up for this fact. I'd say those three subjects account for about 9-10 of those credits. I suppose you could say they're important.
I did a four-year CS degree after about twenty years in industry. I learned one thing, which I do not use.
My recommendation is don't waste your time and money unless you have a specific goal in mind or want to go on to a master's program - which I also generally don't recommend unless, again, you have a very specific goal and no other way of accomplishing it.
Looking at the course listing for UNH ( https://ceps.unh.edu/computer-science/program/bs/computer-sc... ), I'd suggest auditing (I imagine that's cheaper if you're not looking for a degree?) some of the following: Data Structures and Introduction to Algorithms, Assembly Language Programming and Machine Organization, Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Operating System Fundamentals, Algorithms, Programming Language Concepts and Features, Compiler Design, Systems Programming, Formal Specifications and Verification of Software Systems. Those are the ones that look like more formal CS, and gets you into at least an intro to fun formal/theory stuff like automata, grammars, low-level programming, functional programming. Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems and Mathematical Optimization for Applications also look fun to me, or you may be interested in some of the other electives too like Computer Vision, ML, etc.
If that's local, affordable, and easy, I wouldn't worry too much about looking for something "fancier" right off the bat, I think there's a lot to sink your teeth into there. There's a lot of stuff online too on all these topics of course, but if you're like me, that's not the same as taking a live course.
I recommend you email or call the admissions team for programs you’re interested in. I did undergrad in CS and business and was interested in a different engineering discipline masters after quite a few years of unrelated work. The responses varied significantly among the programs I looked at, but the admission teams were all helpful and clear on requirements & expectations.
I did sort of the opposite of OP, during my masters I stopped just about halfway in because I just couldn't justify the time investment needed to complete the program over gaining experience at the startup I was already heavily involved in.
I completed all the "fun" courses, the ones that really taught computer science, but the focus and attention I needed to complete courses like advanced logic and discrete mathematics III I just couldn't combine with a fulltime job. I'm no math wiz, so those courses were really tough for me.
I now realize there's other universities that have less maths and more of the fun stuff, but even still say I wanted to jump to another specialization if I had 2 full time years to do it I could spend my time so much more efficiently than at a university.
What I remember most in general from my undergrad courses is that most the "fun" ones are the ones where I already was interested in the topic to the degree I knew something about it or if I didn't it's obvious I would have learned something if it was brought up at some time.
The "not fun" ones on the other hand are the ones I remember the most from because those memories aren't competing with lots of other exposure to those concepts and thus they left a lasting impression that I might not have gotten any other way.
Going down the path of "fun" might be easiest and overall more enjoyable, but it also ultimately might be less fulfilling in the end. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Based on what the OP wrote, Georgia Tech's OMSCS program would be worthwhile, especially if they are interested in the systems track. The UT Austin program is also modeled on GA Tech's program and looks especially good for its theoretical ML courses.
OMSCS has a lot of flexibility in being able to attenuate your course load, gives 6 years to complete the degree, and your peers are mostly working professionals. That's a big advantage of online-first programs.
I did the same thing starting in 2018 (so far fewer programs offering anything online plus I wanted one that offered health insurance because I was contracting at the time). I went to a school that is not at all prestigious but it's proven to be an amazing decision.
I got some mentorship that triggered growth on an intellectual, professional, and even personal level. At the end my advisor really worked hard to put me in a great job that was exactly right for me, it didn't change my earnings but the work is fascinating and the environment is excellent.
All this to say that like anything else it is what you make it and it's all about specific relationships. Look for specific faculty members you might connect with, even just taking their classes.
Also if you do enroll, make sure to go to campus at least once a semester: shake some hands, sit in some offices, make sure people can put a face to an email signature.
I got mine through Auburn distance learning. The main appeal to me was that it was the same degree as in-residence. You were just watching the classes online. This was pre-COVID, so many more universities may do this now, but it seemed rare back then. I really enjoyed it. Also, to caveat, This masters was in Software Engineering, which is obviously different than Computer Science (one of my undergrad degrees).
I've also seen people mentioning if they were going to get a masters they would do so in a different field. I just finished one in policy. I learned much more in this masters than I expected. I realized there are many games to be played, this article was posted to the top page this week and resonated because of it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31267685
Andrew Gelman's blog has a discussion of Columbia cheating on its numbers reported to US News, which had a huge impact on its ranking. I don't know how far it extends to its Master's CS program specifically, but I feel that Columbia's ranking should be discounted entirely. This is quite unfortunate, as it has a distinguished faculty who take no part in this evil.
It depends a lot on the teachers imho, the difference is chalk and cheese, I did my degrees before the internet. I had some math teachers that in hind sight weren't very good, I found this out many years later watching Gilbert Strang teaching linear algebra amongst others. In CS though I was lucky enough to have a couple of lecturers that wrote the books on the subject, the depth of knowledge they had was huge (as you'd expect). To be a crotchety old man - you youngsters have it so easy now :-) - you can watch the experts in any field teach it, even ask them a question, the stuff of dreams. So I think because of this the value of a masters coursework is a lot less than it was, at least in CS.
#1. The fundamentals are the same, but a lot of things have changed in the past 30 years. The coursework, somewhat, brings you closer to up-to-date.
#2. Non-FAANG. Looking to be a director or a tech fellow? No formal education during your career is a bad signal. Of course there are exceptions, but it is expected that you have invested in yourself (MBA also meets this requirement).
My personal achievements:
#1. Greatly improved my writing skills.
#2. Understand deeply and can communicate technical concepts that previously I dealt with on the "gut feel" level.
#3. Able to identify ignorance and stupidity in my leadership directly, where previously I lacked enough context to be sure of them being wrong.
As someone who has a MS in CS (I did a combined BS/MS program) and who interviews lots of people, I don't think a MS in CS has much value as a credential (if any). If you enjoy taking classes and get a lot out of them, that's primarily where the value will be. It definitely helps a ton to have a undergraduate degree. CS is great, but if you have been working in the industry for a while, most people do not really care what your undergraduate degree was in, either.
Is it a cure for imposter syndrome for those who think it's due to not having a CS degree? I don't know. It's a very expensive cure (in time and money) if so.
There are different kinds of MS degrees. Some take people with no real cs knowledge, and some are stepping stones to a PhD. The latter is a very valuable credential, as it indicates deep technical and theoretical cs knowledge. The interview should be able to elicit this
You won't even get a reply (from employers where folks want to work), such as Netflix, SpaceX, JPL, most other BigTech without a CS/IT/EE degree. Resume goes straight to /dev/null.
Basically anywhere where you have to compete with a lot of people, it is the first filter to cut the stack from 100 to 50.
I’m an engineering manager at Netflix and this isn’t true. I’m really proud of the fact that a lot of colleagues come from so many different backgrounds.
I’ve seen data scientists from political science backgrounds, UI engineers who studied literature and philosophy, and I have a CS degree myself, but I’m originally from the bioinformatics space.
Never received a reply from the Hollywood office, over the span of three to five years, despite 20 years of VFX and internet co experience. Others have said the same.
Now, networking is a thing of course. Many people get in that way, but for J. Random Applicant reading this, not an option.
Yes, they are close by. JPL app was rejected within 5 minutes. Grapevine tells me they discourage talking to folks with "just a" Bachelor's these days.
This is the ONLY program I'd like to get into because so far it is the only program that I know deals a lot with hardcore malware analysis. There are probably more programs available but I didn't spend much time researching options.
Unfortunately this program is NOT online, and I'm not in Europe. ALAS! If anyone knows a similar online program in NA please let me know!
Georgia Tech online masters looks like it does. I found this in the article author’s links when he breaks down the schools. Id really like to take this class too so it stood out to me.
My advice to you - look at the top tier security conferences (CCS, IEEE S&P, USENIX Security and maybe NDSS). Find malware analysis papers that interest you. Look what universities the authors come from and see if they offer an online program. The university you link to above are research leaders in this area (H. Bos & C. Giuffrida), and in general this will usually be reflected in the quality of teaching available for a particular topic in a given institution.
OP may already possess a master's degree, school-of-life alumnus.
But I "get" it. I've thought of doing this too.
I would add one criteria: I get to do the whole master's degree using Rust.
I'm sure this would narrow the field of schools.
I want a master's from a school that recognizes that it's effectively over for C++ and Java. At least it's completely over in my own mind. There's no way in hell I'm doing a master's degree where the school's obsolete syllabus dictates those legacy languages.
This stipulation might garner considerable traction. This quirky old guy, with more industry experience than anyone on faculty, will run advance reconnaissance for us, which is something he's been doing much longer than our typical master's students have been alive.
Because let's be honest guys: it's all about Rust going forward. If you feel otherwise I respect that view, but you haven't seen the shit I've seen.
I'd do a Rust-centric master's degree in a heartbeat, and I'm sure I'd love every minute of it.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle. A MSc is not supposed to teach you programming languages, because whatever you learn now will in any case be obsolete in 10 years. It's supposed to teach you fundamentals and how to think, which is timeless.
One of the most famous introductory CS courses in the world, MIT's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", was for decades taught using a programming language called Scheme, a dialect of Lisp that's wildly different from any mainstream language and is used for basically nothing other than this course. This was partly intentional, since it does a great job of shocking teenage hacker wannabes out of their "I already know language X so I'm hot shit" complacency.
So tech is a lot like crossing a river hopping from rock to rock. You make these leaps, and you try (or mostly hope) these leaps lead to a great career.
At the beginning, you're a 20-something person. You mostly don't get to pick your steps, especially if you're in the employed-by-others track.
Standing in the river on my rock, at this advanced career stage, I'm certainly not looking to "learn programming languages". That was long ago.
Right now it's all about picking the next leap based on the conviction that it's going to be a great ride in the future, which is much closer to sunset for me than most in this forum.
Spoken like an experienced software engineer and certainly not the type of person who is well suited for a formal classroom environment. But take a peak inside any of the Fortune 500 and you would surely walk back your assertion that it's effectively over for C++ and Java, regardless of how useful or elegant Rust might be.
> There's no way in hell I'm doing a masters degree where the school's obsolete syllabus dictates those legacy languages
This applies not only to languages, but techniques, systems knowledge, documentation - everything about it really.
Part of the problem with selecting a degree on the basis of modernity is each course in the degree can be vastly different - some are up to date, others are 10 years out of date.
There's also a slight risk in doing a course in its first year, because the bugs haven't been ironed out.
Rust is fantastic for some problems, poor for others. If your alternative is C++, or you're doing something where you need to compile high performance code to wasm, go for it. If your alternative is Java and you're writing high level backend services, it might not be worth the cost, especially given the difficulty of finding / training experienced Rust programmers.
I would love to do this also, mostly because the Rust compiler probably has a master's degree worth of advice hidden in it and it would be helpful to have human guides to point out its wisdom.
Ah, you fell for the trap. Notice how the course description you link is hosted on purdueglobal.edu? Purdue Global (formerly Kaplan) is totally unrelated to the main campus. Basically they took a garbage online college and slapped the Purdue name on it. The “real” Purdue of course has an MS in CS program, though AFAIK it’s only full-time and in-person.
> In my experience, an MS degree has been one of the strongest indicators of poor technical interview performance.
I'll share a comment that I made when I read that article: please note _technical interview performance_. Not job performance. Because a MS may not teach you leetcode-style algorithms as a BS. Spoiler: OMSCS does, with graduate algorithms, which is in fact quite pointless if you're a mid career software engineer, but useful if you're a career switcher.
Maybe stupidly, but with the super segmented world we work in, with massive systems, I'd honestly rather a few certs in whatever enterprise thing we are working with.
Thanks! I was looking for a program at Oxford. USN&WR has it at #11 worldwide for CS.
The SE program at Oxford doesn't seem to be available for 100% remote study, though. Am I missing something? I love this informal, friendly Web site, and I might be looking in the wrong places.
I’m currently attending it. It was full-remote during pandemic. Now you have a few courses still online but most of them are in person (1 week of lectures per module in Oxford). Not sure how it will be when things settle post-pandemic, but my impression is that it will continue to require in-person classes.
I’m interested in hearing more about this program. How is it, and would you recommend it for an American? Is it even possible for an American to fly in for the week-long intensives like the other comment on here says? That would be worth the experience.
What was your background when you applied and how tough is entry? (I see that there is a 99 application average over the past three years with 70 acceptances?)
You get a degree from Oxford at the end, which definitely opens doors. Of the ten modules I did, 2-3 were exceptional and stay with me today. 2-3 were trash. There rest were OK. It's an excellent excuse to get familiar with the subject, and the one-week onsite format followed by the six weeks of coursework is excellent.
> would you recommend it for an American? Is it even possible for an American to fly in for the week-long intensives like the other comment on here says?
Yes, we had quite a few Americans in my cohort doing this
> What was your background when you applied and how tough is entry?
I essentially flunked out of high-school, but I had ten years of solid commercial experience under my belt, and some interesting open-source contributions and tech talks at conferences, and they let me in. I suspect I had the potential to interview well as I also was awarded an academic prize at the end for highest overall marks...
However they also had this really interesting system when I was there where you could essentially earn your way in: they'd let you come and do the SEM module (challenging, but not nuts), and if you passed, they'd let you in as a real student.
I guess @petesergeant already answered most of your questions, but to add a bit more colour...
I don't know how tough is the entry because I have not seen the other applications. What I did appreciate in the application process is that since the target audience is working professionals, you can get 3 letters of recommendations from people that you worked with, not necessarily academic recommendations (for someone who has been out of uni for a while, makes the process much less painful).
Some other selling points of the programme for me:
- 1-week modules, instead of one evening per week - much easier to organise if you don't live in Oxford
- No exams - for each module that you attend, you have one week of lectures, followed by an assignment that you have 6 weeks to submit the answers. Assignments demand a lot of time to complete, but I find it much more manageable when you are working than cramming for one big exam
- Flexible curriculum - to complete the course, you need to complete 10 modules plus a project (like a Master Thesis) in 2-4 years. But you have complete freedom to pick and choose any course from those that are offered (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/courses/subjects.html). So you can customise the programme according to your interests.
- Time flexibility - you can complete in 2-4 years. There are 3 terms per year, so you can attend one module per term and finish in 4 years, or if you have more time available, attend more modules in a term and finish in less time.
The downside of the flexible nature of the programme is that you have less of a feeling of "class of '19", or whatever the year of your intake. You will bump into people that are taking their first or last modules, and some of them you will only see once. You will still have the chance of going out for a beer with them, so I don't mean that you won't have a chance of networking.
Thank you! This is not only helpful but sounds like my ideal program in terms of learning, flexibility, and chance to explore something new.
I’m curious to hear about the SEM (I assume Software Engineering Mathematics) method of qualifying perhaps as a post-graduate (non-matriculated) learner — this taken from the other commenter. This seems like an ideal way to test out the structure and style of a classroom and qualify by achieving high marks before committing and fully applying to the program. Is this a thing that you’ve heard about? There isn’t anything on the website about qualifying for the program through this.
Email the programme office and start a conversation with them -- they're pretty responsive. My interview was just sitting down and chatting with one of their professors for an hour or so and we geeked out and it was fine.
> an ideal way to test out the structure and style of a classroom
My understanding is that all the courses are explicitly available to anyone who wants to take them and can be booked by members of the public, although expect there to be priority to matriculated students for very popular courses (of which SEM is _not_ one). They were about £1,400 each last time I checked.
I don't think I'm giving away anything I shouldn't by saying that SEM is the first 10 chapters of http://www.usingz.com/ taught in classroom form (see the course desc at: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/pro/subjects/SEM.html and compare to the TOC of Using Z), and certainly I benefited by having read and understood it first (which was very challenging, but also SEM has kept coming in useful at the weirdest times in my professional career).
It's primarily an in-person program, delivered in one-week intensives. However, they went 100% remote for during the pandemic and apparently they are considering a hybrid option in the future.
I can’t speak to what the current sitch is, but when I was there you had to be onsite for 11 weeks over four-five years. Quite a few Americans would fly in for it
My brother, 56, has been pursuing his Master's Degree at Columbia for over a year now, and he won't complete it until he's sixty (he's going part-time because he has a job), and the take-away is that it's a huge time investment, even as a part-time student. Sure, he cut away YouTube and Facebook, but he also had to cut away the gym. It's a sacrifice.
The other take-away is that if you don't have the math pre-reqs for a course, and you figure that's okay because you've always been pretty good at math & you'll just power through: don't. Take the pre-reqs first, unless you want to needlessly suffer.
I obtained a MS in CS online from DePaul and I really enjoyed it. I got it as a backup plan as I wasn't working as a programmer at the time (but I am now a FT programmer). To be honest the course work felt like a glorified BS degree but it served its intended purpose.
Honestly I would love to get another MS in data science and/or statistics. I could go the self-learn way but I need the structure and accountability that is required to obtain a degree. Otherwise I get side tracked in my self-learning path ... SQUIRREL!
I'm currently doing one with Arizona State University and so far it has been pretty decent. Would recommend checking it out. It does match most of the requirements you are looking for.
I took a look at the UT and university of Illinois page, they are full online programs using edX and coursera.
I would like to know How are a program like this valued by industry / society? Whether it's valued or just skipped by many since it's "not real/online" master degree.
Full online courses like this interesting for me who's based on the other part of the world.
related but unrelated: does anyone have experience going back for a PhD/transitioning into academia after years in industry? I can't find many people who've done it, most of the professors and grad students I've ever spoken to either ended up working at a lab as their "industry" work or just went straight to grad school.
I'm trying to do a PhD part time while working although I don't plan to go to academia, now or in the future.
For me it's a way of focusing on some topic related to my work: I'm a machine learning engineer and I'm doing the PhD in AI/optimization. I have spent just a year on it so success is still far away.
I know people however that went back to academia but they had some previous experience for example as teaching assistants.
It is a complex topic, and imo the people who have done it have high variance in their outcomes. For example some brought their industry perspective back into academic research and did well, and some just feel very ill-adjusted to academic research (I just cannot get over the fact that performance critical code gets written in often buggy Python in my area) and get homesick. I think some parts of CS academia just does not care about the software engineering (robustness, speed, etc.), and these can be tough to adjust to, so it varies by area too.
Disclaimer: never been in industry, but knows several people (PhD students, professors) who were in industry once
I've drifted in and out of academia since my undergrad (in physics). Started out at hardware design in industry, went back to do PhD in space science, later on ended up working as software engineer in industry, now teach software development at a technical university.
I've never viewed degrees as vocational training. They were always something I did for myself. For example, I completed an MS and an MBA while in my 30s. Neither were particularly career enhancing beyond credentialism which seems pervasive here in the US. Hence, the success of the various certification programs, Microsoft, Java, et al., which as a former hiring manager, I didn't find that these certifications necessarily yielded better candidates. Both masters required an immense amount of autodidacticism to round out what was acquired in class. And many of these topics were covered on tests, i.e. if you didn't put in the time on your own, you weren't passing the class. Now that I'm retired, the question I haven't yet wrapped my arms around is whether I want to pursue another degree, e.g., math. No real application, just for fun.
I graduated in December with my masters from Georgia Tech and I highly recommend it. Great program.
To the commenter who said that a masters won’t help you and is only for entry level positions… that’s simply not true. Many positions have a masters degree as a prerequisite. Having an education is never not a good idea.
> The value of a MSCS for me is that I think it would help get me technical leadership jobs at big companies
At least in the US this is not true. Many people on the leadership at Amazon and Google (at least in my tenure there) didn't have masters or PhDs, what matters most are your professional achievements, actually smaller/medium corporations are the ones that will be impressed with your cert/degree. I have seen managers with no degrees( that started as a self-taught developers and later became managers) managing engineers graduated from MIT/Hardvard/etc. Maybe in Canada things are a bit different in that regard. Not discouraging OP or anything , everyone can spend their money however they see fit. Just pointing out of the myths I see often in legacy media.
I went back for a mid career masters and it was a great choice. It allowed me to reenter the "fresh grad" hiring pipeline and allowed me to get a job at a more prestigious and research focused company than I think I would have been able to get otherwise
So, one of my criteria is a credentialed master's degree at the university, available 100% remote. I don't see a master's degree in CS or software engineering on their site. Also, it seems like the degrees they do give are from "Harvard Extension", which is also something I don't want.
Hi Evan, they do have a masters in software engineering through the extension school. I'm currently working on my degree there. It's not 100% remote. I'm very happy with the school though. Anyways, here's the link for the masters program : https://extension.harvard.edu/academics/programs/software-en...
Wow, thanks! That does look really good. I don't like "Extension", but otherwise it seems solid. The price tag sounds like they consider it a valuable commodity.
Yeah, just want to clarify, I'm working on an undergrad. I don't like the extension part either. But no other "brand name" school offers undergrad (mostly) online. My company does help pay for it though. Undergrad is a little cheaper than grad, but not by a lot.
Fair enough. I had an older model of the GRE in mind, when there were only 1 or 2 in-person test sessions per year, so taking the GRE in spring 2022 would mean I couldn't start classes until fall 2023.
It looks like the GRE is now available online, 24/7/365, so I could probably study and take it in the next month or two. There were a cluster of Fall 2022 application deadlines at the beginning of May, but if I decide to apply for Spring 2022, a GRE might be worthwhile to give my application package a boost.
Has anyone completed an edX master degree program in Computer Science and later got hired because of it? In general I would like to hear positive and negative experiences of doing a CS master online on edX.
> The value of a MSCS for me is that I think it would help get me technical leadership jobs at big companies
Its 2022. Been 10 years in the industry. I cannot agree to this.
I clearly see Big companies (recruiters, MANGA) selecting experienced resumes based on years of past experience, resume keyword matching, leetcode expertise and salary expectations.
1 year of leetcode + 1 year of AWS positions me better for an offer from Amazon than a Masters degree.
Getting a MSc mid-career usually won't make any significant difference in your pay as a software developer. I've hired lots of developers and the degree didn't make any difference mid-career for the offer but your professional experience. For some niche jobs it might make a difference but for most jobs it won't.
What I mean is the jobs that you can get with a master's degree you can get just as easily with a bachelor's degree. The advanced degree really doesn't make a difference.
People always say this but I don't think you have experienced the other end in practice. There are countless job postings in the AI/ML/DS space for example that explicitly want people with MS or PhDs and recruiters will happily tell you that straight to your face. Hell I was just passed up for a Director of DS position and they explicitly said it was because I don't have a PhD!
I added a note about pay, but I'll say it here too: NACE did a survey in 2021 that showed a 46.9% starting salary differential for holders of a master's in CS over those with a bachelor's.
If you've got some data to the contrary, please feel free to share it.
All the best for your studies. I also decided to do a mid career masters, but as I did not have a completed undergrad degree I opted for an MBA in AI via a “non prestigious” UK university, as I also wanted part time, online and cheap. I’m a 3rd way through now.
I’m in a similar position (incomplete BSc, but 20+ years commercial experience) and was looking at the OU’s masters but wasn’t that impressed with the syllabus.
Neither does the US. Universities can do as they damned well please, subject to accreditation agencies. MIT does not demand a Bachelor’s to do its DEDP programme, just successful completion of the preceding MicroMaster’s. U Colorado has three Master’s on Coursera with similar demands. Do the preceding online courses to the requisite level and they’ll admit you to the Master’s.
But it’s also hard in the UK. Maybe there are more universities that allow it but don’t advertise it anywhere but the number who will state clearly they will take work experience in lieu of a Bachelor’s is small.
I know I'm gonna get downs for this but they could've just written that they want the degree for free, without doing anything that is required for a proper Master's. All in all, it looks like the author wants convenience and the cake too.
If you're already working as an engr/scientist, the best motivation for a graduate degree would be to contribute something 'new' to the field and/or expand your skills so you get better at the job you're already doing. A grad degree may or may not result in more opportunities or better pay - and if these last two are your motivation, you probably shouldn't get a grad degree in CS. Getting ahead or earning more has very little to do with your IQ and probably a lot more to do with your EQ... I've seen brilliant folk get masters and PhD even in CS, an MBA, even JD... only to end up disenchanted because they start out with the wrong motivation and the outcome doesn't match their expectations.
Examining your motivations is not easy and should be done with someone that knows you well, isn't family and can offer objective/'cold' advice. If they fail to dissuade you w/some real life experiences and you are still fired up, then you should probably go for. it.
TLDR do not embark on a major undertaking without due process (or self process, as it may be).
Trust me, I've 20 years of software engineering exp and an undergrad in CS.
I hadn't, no. It looks like a great way to get a quick update on undergraduate CS.
It doesn't meet my requirement of having a real master's degree from an accredited university without the "extension" or "electronic" qualifier, though.
I'm doing the Algorithms specialisation from Stanford on Coursera right now, just to make sure I'm ready to get started on a master's in the fall.
Instead, it might be better building something like an OS from scratch. I think that would encompass nearly everything valuable you can learn from a Master’s.
I have a BS in Computer Engineering and MS in Electrical Engineering (ML specialty) from a top 20 public engineering school in the late 2000s and now have ~15 years in industry. I am currently enrolled at Georgia Tech for OMSCS. I was getting bored at work, my employer would pay for it and I figured why not? I enjoyed my time in real world grad program, OMSCS would be just just as fun. Plus, it's Georgia Tech! I can upgrade my MS from top 20 to top...5?
Well...it wasn't as educational or as fun as real world school. Those who claim Discord is a substitute (or even better?) for in person collaboration in an academic environment with like minded peers, uh ok...I am in those Discord channels and...100% disagree.
One thing I found out about Georgia Tech's graduate program is that it's more of a measure of grit, not a measurement of your knowledge. Their harder courses aren't necessarily hard material that one can't grasp. It's that the 40 hour projects...it's 10 hours of learning/implementation and 30 hours of a few little nuance issues that add no value to your knowledge base.
If you want to see how difficult the material are - many of the courses are on Udacity. Projects won't be listed, but maybe you can find similar ones online.
Since my employer pays for education (not just graduate, but if you don't have a BS they'll pay for it too!), I have a lot of colleagues as well as peers in industry who went the Georgia Tech route. It makes sense. Pure online, inexpensive, renown.
Everyone I know - and I mean everyone...when they have only a few classes left take the easiest ones to get it over with , i.e. Digital Marketing and whatever is ranked easy on OMSCS Central.
If someone is young in their career and wants to upgrade their piece of paper this would be an OK route. If you're older - you likely have an idea of what you want to learn. And if not, well, just watch all the Tech Udacity classes! There are plenty of online resources and communities of top professionals to surround yourself in where your time is spent more effectively.
As for me - I found myself taking Digital Marketing for my 5th class...I dropped my 6th class after getting tired of a particular bulls--- project. I will wait and see if I decide if I reenroll in the Fall. I am leaning towards a no.
IMHO if you are or want to be a software engineer, plenty of more relevant resources out there to grow your knowledge without wasting your time. If you want to be a hard core computer scientist, do an in person program so you can focus and be surrounded by peers and professors.
Tech's OMSCS is ground breaking in that it provides a quality education to everyone. But it is not a quality education for everyone and I wanted to have at least one post here with a contrarian point of view.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation and had been considering a Masters degree for several years before finally giving up on the idea. I wish the author luck, and from what I saw doing my research I expect he'll need quite a lot of it if he wants to be successful.
The challenges I've seen with masters programs fall into a few broad categories:
First, few admissions processes seem to really be designed to accommodate returning students, especially those who have been out of academia for a long time. Most schools want recommendation letters, and expect at least one or two of those to come from academia. You can get professional recommendations, and it seems like having one or two is a benefit, but a lack of any academic recommendations seems to put you in a bad position for admissions.
It's also quite hard to make up for other admissions blockers if you've been out of school for a while. If you have missing prerequisites or a low GPA your out of luck. Finding out you need more research experience seems to be another significant blocker, although I've heard of people in industry successfully volunteering time working with researchers to get experience ahead of Masters applications, so that could be possible in some circumstances.
Overall, it seems that unless you finished up your undergrad program already planning for a masters degree, you're going to be stuck with some semesters of taking undergrad courses as a non-degree seeking student to fill in missing prerequisites, get the relationships with instructors that you'll need for referrals, and possibly get documented evidence to counter questions about a low GPA.
That ties into the second problem: Most programs lack the flexibility they'd need to provide real value to experienced developers. Masters programs could have a lot to offer experienced developers without a formal CS background, but they are largely designed for people with little work experience, and the requirements involve a lot of courses that are going to be a waste of time for someone with substantial industry experience. The vast majority of masters programs have some required courses designed to prepare people for industry that are going to be superfluous to anyone with substantial experience. If you have a lot of missing prerequisites on your transcript that can be even worse as you're also required to take unnecessary courses outside of a degree program to even be considered.
The lack of flexibility also manifests in another problem: The abysmal state of online programs. There are a lot of bad masters programs out there, but even the good ones aren't going to be good for everyone. Every school has a machine learning and cyber security masters track, and if you have interests outside of those areas then you're going to be substantially limiting the already narrow choices of schools that have a decent curriculum that you can get admitted to. At least for my areas of interest, few of those had quality online programs. That said, suppose you do find an online program that aligns with your interest, the online education system these days requires complete submission to a ludicrous panopticon of the shittiest and most invasive software imaginable. If you like in-person learning or you don't want your life for the next several years to be massively and shamelessly exploited by proctoring spyware, then you better be prepared to relocate, and hope that your manager is okay with you being gone in the middle of the day a few days a week, because few of the best programs offer evening or weekend course options.
After looking at the state of masters programs, I personally decided the easier thing to do was to simply continue self learning, making contacts with researchers who are working in areas that interest me, and work to establish myself enough to have a chance to collaborate independently on research and find ways to get into the kind of work I'm interested in without formal credentials.
UT has this nice list online that they never truly offer - you have at most 3 courses to pick from each semester. And to finish in 2 years you have to take the summer course, which there is one class and no options to pick from. Last summer I took algorithms… probably one of the first CS courses you ever take. I have to take whatever classes are offered every semester to actually finish in 2 years.
The program is disorganized, with you not knowing what classes offered are till a month before registration. And the program scheduling is awful. It’s a Friday and Saturday once a month. It has consistently been on every 3-day weekend.
The program does nothing to accommodate full-time workers despite its description. The courses are re-packaged regular MS courses, complete with all the homework and office hours in the middle of the work day. Sometimes you’ll have projects that are awkwardly due, due to requiring information from lectures once a month. And you will spend time doing tedious projects - most of them are not well-designed to reinforce the course material and end up being busy work.
All in all, it’s not worth it. It has marginal value a few years out if you don’t have a CS undergrad, but it’s value drops quickly with every year of experience.