It seems clear that for people with a bachelor’s in CS, from a purely monetary viewpoint, getting a master’s in the same area usually is dumb unless you plan on programming a long time.
This article says the average mid-career pay for MSc holders is $114,000. This says the mid-career bachelor’s salary is $102,000. A master’s means 12 to 24 months of lost pay and anywhere from a $20,000/year salary in some lucky cases to a $50,000+ debt. You need at least a decade of future work to justify this. And that likely overstates the benefits since it does not control for ability.
I don’t necessarily trust these statistics but employers can always make people write code on whiteboards to assess actual skill.
An exception might be if you want technically cutting-edge CS: Google for example prefers MSc/PhD guys. But I think most programming jobs are not like that.
FYI, it is possible to do a part-time masters program and some employers will pay for you to get a graduate degree (usually as part of an agreement to keep working for the company several years afterwards).
IMO the real problem is that academia teaches computer science whereas what programmers need to know to be valuable is software engineering. Those seem to be rather different disciplines.
Disclaimer: I didn’t study CS myself and this opinion is based on indirect evidence.
It seems clear that for people with a bachelor’s in CS, from a purely monetary viewpoint, getting a master’s in the same area usually is dumb unless you plan on programming a long time.
This article says the average mid-career pay for MSc holders is $114,000. This says the mid-career bachelor’s salary is $102,000. A master’s means 12 to 24 months of lost pay and anywhere from a $20,000/year salary in some lucky cases to a $50,000+ debt. You need at least a decade of future work to justify this. And that likely overstates the benefits since it does not control for ability.
I don’t necessarily trust these statistics but employers can always make people write code on whiteboards to assess actual skill.
An exception might be if you want technically cutting-edge CS: Google for example prefers MSc/PhD guys. But I think most programming jobs are not like that.
FYI, it is possible to do a part-time masters program and some employers will pay for you to get a graduate degree (usually as part of an agreement to keep working for the company several years afterwards).
IMO the real problem is that academia teaches computer science whereas what programmers need to know to be valuable is software engineering. Those seem to be rather different disciplines.
Disclaimer: I didn’t study CS myself and this opinion is based on indirect evidence.