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bob dobbs is dead posted:yeah, i usually take it as strong negative signal for peeps who have only cs masters That is wild, leave the hiring process.
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May 23, 2020 16:25
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Eggnogium posted:That is wild, leave the hiring process. this is after the third peep who basically couldn't fizzbuzz basically i agree hard with this peep https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/ although the rest of their blog is useless bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 16:33 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 16:26
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Eggnogium posted:That is wild, leave the hiring process. Almost every person I know with a Master's in CS is a subpar programmer. The remaining person has their Master's from RPI and are a decent programmer, but the reason they have the Master's is they couldn't get in to the Ph.D program they wanted - and hoped the Master's would be enough to get them in to it.
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May 23, 2020 16:33
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There are a few good reasons to do a master's degree in CS. Off the top of my head:
bob dobbs is dead posted:basically i agree hard with this peep This person is writing specifically about Silicon Valley startups in the mid-2010s. That means they're dealing primarily with Stanford graduates, which is a bit of a special case.
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May 23, 2020 16:37
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tbh, #4 on that list is gonna apply and its gonna apply hard so it might still be worth it
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May 23, 2020 16:39
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The thrust of that blog seems to be that a CS MS without a CS BS is not a great look, which sure, but the issue is the lack of BS. A couple paragraphs of armchair psych and sample size 3 hiring experience don’t actually mean you’ve cracked a code. Ignore the masters unless it involves coursework hyper specific to the role in which case minor positive.
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May 23, 2020 16:47
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In regards to pandemic forced WFH, I’m one of those people that doesn’t cope as well with full remote and am definitely looking forward to returning to the office. That said, I don’t have a horrible commute to deal with (two miles and 10-15 minutes on a bus, or 40 minutes on foot), and my coworkers are cool and the neighborhood where my office is has tons of delicious lunch places that I miss. I’m just the type that needs a clear physical and mental divide between work and home, and having a separate room in my house as an office doesn’t cut it. What I’m hoping for is greater acceptance by workplaces of WFH and more flexible schedule options. My current company already had an extremely generous WFH/flextime policy before the pandemic, so nothing needs to change. I might have an easier time asking for arbitrary WFH days here and there, like deciding to work from my porch if I’m doing solitary tasks and have no meetings. My previous company was super cagey about WFH and flexible schedules and lost a couple excellent devs over of it, but now the pandemic’s forced their hand and they converted to full remote pretty easily and it’s working out just fine for them, so maybe it will actually stick and they’ll stop being weirdos about it. It was to the point where I was scared to ask for them and still feel guilty about asking at my current job even though I know my current job is super cool about it and will always say yes. I just hope that full remote doesn’t become the norm in this industry. Having the WFH option whenever you want is really, really nice, but having it be the only option is a different beast.
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May 23, 2020 16:50
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TheAardvark posted:Almost every person I know with a Master's in CS is a subpar programmer. The remaining person has their Master's from RPI and are a decent programmer, but the reason they have the Master's is they couldn't get in to the Ph.D program they wanted - and hoped the Master's would be enough to get them in to it. Same experience here. Quite a lot of mediocre people default to "well, I'll get a masters!" while their peers go actually learn how poo poo works in industry. It's definitely not a strike against you to have gotten more education, but often it does correlate with meh candidates.
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May 23, 2020 17:29
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Queen Victorian posted:In regards to pandemic forced WFH, I’m one of those people that doesn’t cope as well with full remote and am definitely looking forward to returning to the office. That said, I don’t have a horrible commute to deal with (two miles and 10-15 minutes on a bus, or 40 minutes on foot), and my coworkers are cool and the neighborhood where my office is has tons of delicious lunch places that I miss. I’m just the type that needs a clear physical and mental divide between work and home, and having a separate room in my house as an office doesn’t cut it.  Having the option to go into the office to whiteboard/brainstorm in person is 10x more efficient and helpful, especially as a newer hire to a large rear end enterprise. I also struggle to mentally switch between work and leisure at home, namely because I do not have an office. I have two desks side-by-side and I just wake up and roll my home computer chair 5 feet over to my work setup.
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May 23, 2020 17:59
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kloa posted:
Simulate a commute at the end of the day. Turn your computer off and go out for a walk, or exercise at home, or just do anything else. Even twenty minutes makes a huge difference.
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May 23, 2020 18:15
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Working from home with a small child is near impossible. God bless my wife but just having the "anything I can do to help" distraction makes it really hard to focus on work.
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May 23, 2020 18:20
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I didn't do a BS in CS, did a Masters after 2 years of working in an unrelated field, and got a job very shortly after graduating. I'm on my third job now and make around average mid-level SWE money for a NYC engineer with 5 years of experience. Maybe I'm a bad engineer but gatekeeping on the fact that someone has an MS is an at best naive and at worst toxic thing to do. Assess people in your interviews in a way such that you're evaluating their ability to do the job you're hiring for, I'm sure there are plenty of people with a BS that are garbage too! If you want to make an argument about the monetary value of an MS and the fact that they are expensive and you can probably become just as proficient without one, be my guest. But a lot of people do better in structured learning programs.
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May 23, 2020 18:28
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I don't "gatekeep" based on someone having an M.S., but when I see someone getting it immediately after a B.S. in CS, with no experience, they're likely to be a poor candidate. I will still give them the interview if they meet the other requirements, but it's a red flag. It means that person got their bachelor's degree, and decided that two more years of education was a better move for their career than 2 years' experience. In my experience, and apparently at least 3 other peoples' (2 in this thread + the article), that type of developer tends to be not very good.
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May 23, 2020 18:37
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yeah, its not a throw out the resume thing but its signal
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May 23, 2020 18:39
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That seems weird, do you have the same attitude towards those that got graduate degrees in things that aren't computer science?
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May 23, 2020 18:47
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its not the grad degree, its the grad degree being used to switch careers w/o the bachelors
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May 23, 2020 18:48
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Who gives a poo poo about a degree after you have experience? Someone who got a masters with 0 experience working is probably applying for the same positions as those with a Bachelors and should be given the same treatment in hiring decisions. Also, a few posts above, a 3 person sample size??? Anecdotally I've worked with some great engineers who were totally self taught and some garbage engineers who went to Ivy League schools. After experience degrees mean literally nothing in terms of engineer quality (which is an entirely different component of discourse I'd rather not conflate into this discussion).
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May 23, 2020 18:52
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heres regehrs opinion for what its worth https://blog.regehr.org/archives/953
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May 23, 2020 18:54
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I did a MS in CS starting in 2003 post dot com crash and also to recover from gamedev and have no regrets.
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May 23, 2020 19:34
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bob dobbs is dead posted:heres regehrs opinion for what its worth This is a good read, thanks. Completely anecdotally, it aligns with my experience in industry. Having an MS is of course not a bad thing, but if it's all you've got it's a soft red flag for someone with a lot of academic theory but few practical skills. One can easily overcome this bias by demonstrating that they in fact have some practical programming skills. But many don't.
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May 23, 2020 19:39
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Are you comparing people who went straight through to candidates with two years of dev experience?
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May 23, 2020 19:44
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ultrafilter posted:Are you comparing people who went straight through to candidates with two years of dev experience? I don't - I compare them with other fresh CS grads while keeping in mind their salary requirements are going to be a notch higher.
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May 23, 2020 19:47
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Paolomania posted:I did a MS in CS starting in 2003 post dot com crash and also to recover from gamedev and have no regrets. yeah grad school is great for avoiding recessions even if you are pretty eh about academia http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1078
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May 23, 2020 20:02
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Echoing the rest of the thread the most useless programmer I've ever run across was a guy fresh out of school with a masters in CS. I got the impression that his parents forced him through school like meat through a sausage grinder. At 25 he still lived with his parents. He worked for us for 5 months, produced nothing except one crude and needlessly complex prototype, and then moved on to work for a bank or something I'm sure a master's degree is really good if you want to teach at community college or go work in government or maybe for a government contractor where masters is a nice check mark for everybody involved with good job security etc
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May 23, 2020 20:46
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How is this any different from most people fresh out of school??? Generally people fresh out of school with zero real world experience are "bad" (viewing them like this is an inherent problem itself but a different beast altogether). Hence they get hired as juniors with less responsibility. If companies are incorrectly hiring them into higher positions, that's bad but it's not on the engineers. When it comes to writing production code at a large organization on a big code base I have some news: you were either new and bad once too or you're an arrogant jerk that people probably don't like working with.
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May 23, 2020 20:54
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As much as I would like to disagree (as I'm planning to pursue a combined BS/MS in the future, I'm self-taught, and currently working on my BS, and I'm a "senior eng" in my 40s), my experiences were the same. Almost every single candidate with a MS (and one with a PhD) we're really bad. I ascribe it to our company being pretty uninteresting for interesting people to apply or stay as we don't do anything cool. We're a top 3000 Alexa shop running on JS/node/React and some PHP/C# "legacy", just like every other place out there.
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May 23, 2020 21:07
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bob dobbs is dead posted:heres regehrs opinion for what its worth Schools using masters as a cash cow is why so many people have this view of masters in CS, more than a few top CS schools with prestigious names have a masters program that exists to milk money to fund other parts of the program and not much else. When I was at UT Austin for grad school for example they made a bunch off masters students and due to how graduate classes were graded it was impossible for masters students to fail out of the program as long as they turned in something. As long as they paid tuition and put in frankly less effort than undergrads they'd get their masters. Good Will Hrunting posted:How is this any different from most people fresh out of school??? Generally people fresh out of school with zero real world experience are "bad" (viewing them like this is an inherent problem itself but a different beast altogether). Hence they get hired as juniors with less responsibility. If companies are incorrectly hiring them into higher positions, that's bad but it's not on the engineers. When it comes to writing production code at a large organization on a big code base I have some news: you were either new and bad once too or you're an arrogant jerk that people probably don't like working with. FWIW, I haven't had bad experience with people who use a masters to switch fields (though as John's blog points out the masters isn't going to teach you the basics/intermediates so its very dependent on you), but I have definitely seen the negative correlation when it comes to masters from places that use masters as their cash cows. Not compared to "good engineer" but to what I'd expect for someone fresh out of school, in terms of average ability from those I've interviewed (couple hundred by now?) I'd put fresh undergrads higher then folks who had a CS undergrad and went to get a MS on purpose (as opposed to one as a result of dropping out of a PhD). That's not a reflection on you but just a result of schools ruining the reputation to make a quick dime.
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May 23, 2020 22:17
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That's reasonable. I'm also wondering, do those places let you start a masters without actually doing supplemental coursework? I had 6 or so courses required of me before starting. I could see that being an issue, for sure. That also leads me to think about the baseline level of fundamentals one should take before beginning practical work.
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May 23, 2020 22:47
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apseudonym posted:Schools using masters as a cash cow is why so many people have this view of masters in CS, more than a few top CS schools with prestigious names have a masters program that exists to milk money to fund other parts of the program and not much else. When I was at UT Austin for grad school for example they made a bunch off masters students and due to how graduate classes were graded it was impossible for masters students to fail out of the program as long as they turned in something. As long as they paid tuition and put in frankly less effort than undergrads they'd get their masters. This was the case at my college as well. Actually, even worse, there was a required PowerPoint/Excel/etc. IT 100 class for every major, and being a lab class they couldn't just do massive lectures. That meant dozens of sections for the class. Everyone in the Master's program had to teach that class 20+ hours a week, literally helping people create paragraph breaks in Word. Then the remainder of their time was spent taking IT electives with undergrads. This was capped off with a group project that was pass/fail and simply appearing counted as a pass. Like, what does any of that contribute to how well they'll handle a programming job? The need for teachers for that IT 100 class also meant my school pushed people to enter the MS program hard because otherwise they'd have to actually hire people to teach them. Based on some of the people I've interviewed, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Master's programs these days are that bad.
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May 23, 2020 23:01
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Good Will Hrunting posted:That's reasonable. I'm also wondering, do those places let you start a masters without actually doing supplemental coursework? I had 6 or so courses required of me before starting. I could see that being an issue, for sure. Yes, as far as I can tell, UT had so much grade inflation because of their bonkers GPA requirements for PhDs (3.6/4.0?) that you could get by without the fundamentals and still meet the 2.4 min GPA for masters (our classes were mixed masters/PhD which AFAIK is the standard). TheAardvark posted:This was the case at my college as well. Actually, even worse, there was a required PowerPoint/Excel/etc. IT 100 class for every major, and being a lab class they couldn't just do massive lectures. That meant dozens of sections for the class. Everyone in the Master's program had to teach that class 20+ hours a week, literally helping people create paragraph breaks in Word. Then the remainder of their time was spent taking IT electives with undergrads. This was capped off with a group project that was pass/fail and simply appearing counted as a pass. Huh, what I saw was that masters couldn't get funding via TA/RAships because those all went to the PhD students first and then skilled undergrads second and then finally masters, if there was still anything else. apseudonym fucked around with this message at 23:42 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 23:24
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Husband got a CS masters. He is already a developer raking in cash in a specialized field but is also thinking of going into consulting or academia where credentials tend to matter more, when his other degree is a humanities PhD. But over the several years of taking the classes part-time he ended up picking up a bunch of things that were directly related to work at his job, so it ended up having that as a big side benefit as well.
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May 24, 2020 02:42
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My three reasons would be: 1. I didn't do that well in undergrad, and I'm looking for a way to fill in the gaps of my understanding. Partly for passing whiteboarding interviews, but also to become more secure in my knowledge in general. Sure, I can self-study by taking online classes/reading CLRS/Leetcoding away by my own, but I figure this way I might as well get a degree that's actually from a well-known university. Though based on the previous discussion, it sounds like an online MSCS from GA Tech or UT Austin might be hardly less useless than a Udacity Nanodegree. 2. After working in industry for a few years, I feel as if I'm in a bit of a rut of mid-level API gluing jobs on LOB CRUD apps. Web or mobile, frontend or backend or full-stack, it all looks more or less the same. So a retreat into CS theory, plus the whizzbang cutting-edge elective topics (AI/ML, computer vision, etc.) would be refreshing, and perhaps present opportunities to pivot my career into. Again, I could just take random MOOC classes to get my fill of the same, but the quality online MSCS programs are probably deeper and more rigorous. 3. Intellectual curiosity, more or less similar to some of the replies in this thread about the OMSCS. I figure if I can get my employer to pay for it, or if the program is <=$10k, it doesn't sound so bad. That said, maybe I should take some MOOCs first instead of jumping in with the attitude of "it's like Coursera except I get a degree out of it!", since it seems like the degree might not really be worthwhile anyway. And free does beat having to spend $7k.
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May 24, 2020 03:15
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I have a master's in CS after a BA in English and it's working out well fwiw.
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May 24, 2020 11:26
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TheAardvark posted:with regard to Master's degrees - at least at my college, it was a "last resort" for those who couldn't get a job directly after a bachelor's, or couldn't get one they wanted. Wow, talk about a cultural difference. Where I'm at (Scandinavia), nobody gets a bachelor's unless they are either 1. eager to get out of school and earn money, or 2. not up to the academic challenges of a master's. Employers will offer a higher starting salary for new graduates with a master's. Anecdotally, at my workplace (a large company), almost every senior engineer and manager I've met has a master's degree of some sort. The only bachelor's degrees I see are in IT/admin/operations, and some of the ancient self-taught programmers who started as electronic engineers in the 80's. It's amazing what can happen when higher education is free and the state provides subsidized student loans. (Lobby your congressperson now!)
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May 24, 2020 12:20
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Computer science and software engineering are largely different disciplines, and the applicability of the degree really hinges on whether you need a computer scientist or a software engineer or some particular combination of both
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May 24, 2020 14:33
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I did a MS in CS after doing undergrad philosophy. I actually did my MS full time while having a full time test automation job. My thoughts: a) I've definitely interviewed several terrible candidates with MS in CS. b) The software interviews I got were a LOT easier before I got the MS in CS. c) My company paid for it. Some points: a) MS moves you up places in the h1b lottery so you'll see a lot of non-us national applicants that have it. b) h1b is something of a cash cow for a lot of schools in that schools generally won't do a sponsored MS. I'll just say that the people who really don't like people with MS degrees also don't like h1b applicants, and you can draw your own conclusions from there.
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May 24, 2020 17:21
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are you calling me racist
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May 24, 2020 18:14
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Vulture Culture posted:Computer science and software engineering are largely different disciplines, and the applicability of the degree really hinges on whether you need a computer scientist or a software engineer or some particular combination of both It's really an aside to the actual topic, but I meant M.S. degrees in general. As in, we are more likely to hire someone for a management position if they have an M.S. in engineering management, than if they have a B.S. in same discipline. I guess we're just weird up here...
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May 24, 2020 18:16
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bob dobbs is dead posted:are you calling me racist i think he is
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May 24, 2020 18:55
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:It's really an aside to the actual topic, but I meant M.S. degrees in general. As in, we are more likely to hire someone for a management position if they have an M.S. in engineering management, than if they have a B.S. in same discipline. I guess we're just weird up here... Correlation or causation?
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May 24, 2020 19:44
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