I'd agree that bachelor's are also basically useless - all it tells you is that the candidate can put up with four years of bullshit and still jump through hoop

I'd agree that bachelor's are also basically useless - all it tells you is that the candidate can put up with four years of bullshit and still jump through hoops at the end. A masters degree tells you they're willing to put up with six. I might have just had a bad experience - at my uni the CS Masters program was a pretty blatant cash grab, taking advantage of the visa requirements to pull in Indian students. That would have been fine, but the standards were super low, the students couldn't code at all (by year 5, at least a bachelor's CS student should know how to write a for loop), and we had a major cheating scandal every year. I'm not saying I don't want those Indian students here - I absolutely do - I just wish we weren't creating these nonsense processes and making people contort their lives to fit them.