I graduated from a mediocre CS bachelor program from University of Miami. Courses were not challenging, so I coasted through the program with a 2.9 GPA. After graduation, I spent 6 years as SDE at Amazon and Microsoft. Recent years gatech offers an online course-based CS master for 7k. I wanted to see what a top 10 CS grad program was like, so I got in and have been almost half way through. I feel more and more unmotivated. Course materials feel easier than undergrad CS courses, but workloads are super heavy (20hrs/week). Most classmates come from non-CS backgrounds, so sometimes I have to spend all weeknights and weekends carrying team projects. I basically had almost no life for over a year. I don't think any of these pet projects are resume worthy. If I spent this much effort on leets and grokking, I might have ended up making more TC than I do now. I wonder if I should continue this master. Does CS master hold any value at all to recruiters, hiring managers or interviewers? Blinders who became senior/principal engineers, did you do CS master and feel it added value on top of your CS bachelor? I don't have immigration issues. 250k 6 YOE EDIT: It's for sure good to do both, but time is limited. I feel slow on career progression as I'm still not senior after 6 YOE. I feel the CS master have taken and will take significant amount of time for the next 1.5-2 years with seemingly low return.
Wow so surprised to see the result. I thought most blinders don't give a shit to CS masters according to other threads.
Dm’d you
This would be a good opportunity to improve your GPA, which sucks btw (and you went to a mediocre school) - apologize for the blunt feedback. Don't they have any hard courses?
His GPA doesn’t really matter anymore with 6 Yoe.
It does, if OP doesn't feel good about it.
OMSCS is easier than undergrad but heavy workload? What do you mean? Like lot of busy work but not necessarily hard? Also are your classmates really that bad? Like they can't pull their own weight on group work at all?
Lots of online videos, quizzes and exams to go through. Projects are comparable to that in undergrad courses. For example, write a network file server master slave cluster in C. Very outdated materials and mundane.
Are you me?! I’m also in OMSCS and couldn’t care less. Also, I didn’t include Gatech in my resume when I was looking to switch jobs as I didn’t want to be considered a “new grad”. Still ended up with offers equivalent to Senior Eng in some companies. Tl;dr - only LC matters for TC
Cant you put omscs as in progress part time online on your resume so they would know you are still a full time worker?
Yes. However, I had to make a trade off between utilizing the real estate on my resume for a degree that’s not completed vs a distributed system I built. Didn’t seem to add much value so I just didn’t add it
The education just doesn't seem to matter after a certain point. Only a few companies use it for placement.
Seems like traditional IT companies or consulting firms
That's right. I got a MS and it's just not worth it.
CS masters is useful after mediocre bachelors but not the online one and not after 6 years of experience.
This
Useful in terms of job prospects or learning experience? I already getting approached by FNG recruiters from time to time.
Use the time to learn and invest in yourself. You shouldn’t be thinking masters = more money. You felt the need to increase you skills so stick to it, and use the knowledge to up your game. It may not do wonders for your resume but you get a level up in skills. See it through or waste the last year for zero gain.
The courses seems to outdated or irrelevant to SWE. For example, I learnt HPC (high performance computing) frameworks, but who works on super computer nowadays. Also, learning how CPU optimizes the execution of assembly code doesn't help at all. I don't see 99.9% SWE will do this type of work.
If you're a compiler designer or kernel architect it's useful
Masters is useless if you have an undergrad in computer science or related field.
That's how I start to feel
kind of a stretch to assume your experience at OMSCS is generalizable to online masters at another top 10 school like UIUC MCS. Requirements to graduate, classes available online, matriculated student body demographics, professor quality and teaching styles... all these things intimately determine your experience but vary wildly even across years at the same school, even more so across schools. in my experience, my MCS from UIUC got me attention from recruiters, and gave me a foundation on top of which to progress my career. I could finally get my foot in the FAANG door. If I was already in FAANG with multiple YOE, OR if I was just trying to get into FAANG and didn't have other reasons for doing a masters, I would not have done my masters and would have instead just leetcoded.
I see. Totally make sense. I don't have problems getting approached by FAANG recruiters due to CS background, so I don't see OMSCS adds value to me.
Most OMSCS courses are directed by TA. Course selections are very limited compared to on campus program. I went to wanting to learn deep distributed systems, but I ended up retaking computer architecture, operating systems, and some entry level ML. The depth is not there in these courses.
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Sounds like your burned out and could use a break from the CS program.
Coding for 70 hrs/week for sure. 50 at work and 20 for the master.