The case against CS master's degrees

Not everything has to be about work and employability. Some of us actually enjoy learning and exploring the more theoretical topics in CS.

My CS masters completely changed my life. Would 100% recommend if you are open to learning a bunch of cool stuff.

The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.

I really enjoyed Electrical & Computer Engineering, and took CS classes as electives. Felt the math and engineering courses grew my brain, and the CS courses were enough to get me into software. The CS majors I knew seemed to enjoy their choice less!

It&#x27;s sad that his page about self-studying CS [1] does not include any book specific to the Theory of Computation and Computational Complexity.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teachyourselfcs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teachyourselfcs.com&#x2F;</a>

I did a non-cs undergrad to cs grad path... It was hard. I wasn&#x27;t admitted to the program without fulfilling almost all the core CS undergrad classes. This meant that between the prerequisites and the actual grad classes, I took over 120 credit hours of pure math and CS classes over the course of 5 years.<p>Obviously not every school has the same demands as others, and there are certainly a lot of degree farms that take foreign students money and funnel them though, but I&#x27;m not sure that the authors points ring very true... certainly not for everyone.

And then there&#x27;s my old manager who found a negative correlation between a programmer&#x27;s ability and them holding a PhD in CS. FWIW, he had a MS in Software Engineering himself and he said that the correlation only seemed to hold for CS PhD&#x27;s, not PhD&#x27;s in other sciences. My department had a number of PhD&#x27;s, but only one in CS and that one was hired a few years after that manager left.<p>Correlation isn&#x27;t causation and all that, but it does bias you a certain way.

What masters degree (or even undergraduate degree) is any of that not true of?

I hate to be super-negative, but I&#x27;m not even sure a bachelors in CS is a good idea. Oh sure, you learn a few good things along the way, but then the professors start dragging you down their favorite theoretical paths. I&#x27;m all for philosophizing and navel gazing, but there&#x27;s not much practical in things like lambda calculus, NP-completeness and some of the other topics. To make matters worse, these pursuits can confuse the brain. I know one fancy CS major who dismissed a problem as unsolveable because it was NP-complete. He missed the fact that the dimensions of the problem were such that a quick heuristic did perfectly fine.<p>The sad thing is that large parts of the curriculum aren&#x27;t that valuable. Data structures used to be my favorite, but today it&#x27;s not that important because we stick everything in hash tables or database tables. We rarely use LISTS!<p>The same goes for compilers. No one writes a compiler any more. Apple just repurposed LLVM when they made Swift. But all of the undergraduates have to pull their hair out making toy compilers and for what end?<p>Most of the CS curriculum is pretty extraneous. This is why many companies are deliberately hiring technically competent people from tech fields like physics or chemistry. They learn practical skills to analyze their data-- the kind of practical skills needed by corporations not theory heads.