8 ms·

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some

I'll be honest: has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well"? Surely there are some research level jobs where a PhD in CS is necessary, but for most coding jobs, an MSc is just 2 years of missed experience where you're learning bad habits and antipatterns by never having your code used by other people in any strenuous way. Certainly there are a lot of pros and cons to getting a BA in CS. But "learning how to write code" is not the major advantage of a university education, nor should it be.

RHSeeger 4y ago
> has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well" A Masters in CS doesn't tell me the person knows how to code well, but it does tell me that they are _more likely_ to - Have had experience with a wider variety of algorithms, data structures, and general coding concepts - Have written code to perform more complex things - Written code for someone "outside of a classroom" Certainly the last two are more directly accomplished by actually being in the workforce. However, an educational environment is a far better source for the first one. Now, I'm not saying having a Masters is necessarily _better_ for a developer but - Given two developers with no work experience, one with a Masters and one with a Bachelors; I would generally assume the one with the Masters is a better developer. - Given two developers with a similar amount of work experience, one with a Masters and one with a Bachelors; I would generally assume the one with the Masters is a better developer. - Given two developers, one with a Masters and no work experience, one with a Bachelors a couple years of work experience; I wouldn't make any assumptions about their skill (they're certainly different, but I wouldn't assume one is a better developer than the other). The same logic holds true for me when people try to convince me that a degree in CSci offers no benefit at all, and that it's better to just self study and start working. There's nothing you can learn during a degree that _can't_ be learned by self study; but there's a lot of things that are much more likely to be learned in an academic environment.
herval 4y ago
Depends on the school and depends on the person. The same way many companies in the US assume any grad from MIT is a good engineer, there are companies who look at resumes w/ an MSc and bump them up. From personal experience, MScs are particularly well-regarded in Brazil, for instance.
- nightpool 4y ago
  My question wasn't "do companies think that an MSc is good" but rather "Have you, personally, ever noticed that a candidate with an MSc was better than a candidate with equivalent experience without an MSc". I think we can all agree that whether a company thinks something is good is completely unrelated to whether that thing actually improves your programming ability.
  - herval 4y ago
    Yes, some times.
morelisp 4y ago
I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's always the claim? If all you're doing is the courses, those are accessible to 4th year undergraduates in every university I know. To a person, everyone I've interviewed who did an MSc for the coursework had to because they finished their BSc with minimum effort and no one was interested in hiring them. Even worse is when you see 4y BSc, 2y work, 1y MSc.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I think an accelerated bs/ms might be another exception you should consider. (This being when a bs student can do another year immediately following to get their ms.) It makes sense on ROI as many companies have HR departments more likely to get you into the interview process, and then it’s often a slightly higher starting role. Also, from a knowledge standpoint, some graduate classes help practical abilities only. A 500-level databases course, for example, isn’t research-oriented. It just teaches more advanced topics that might actually matter in the workplace (an intuitive understanding of how/where to use an index, more complicated examples of projects with database connections, etc.). I fall into the case of your first exception, so I’m not actually sure undergraduate courses don’t teach these things. I’ve had a few 500-level classes that had absolutely no research orientation (“object oriented design and development” is another example of a class where the projects are just super-complicated examples of what you experience in industry). Pursuing an accelerated degree shows that the student wasn’t careless in thinking research was something they wanted to do.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    Undergraduates in CS can fill their senior year with 500 level courses easily. Motivated ones also much of their junior year. Why would I take the applicant who did it five over the ones who did it in four? Worrying about the “MSc” label at the end for the same work is just credentialism.
bcrosby95 4y ago
I've thought of going back for an MSc because it sounds kinda fun. Although probably in math rather than CS. I never thought it would be held against me though. Seems weird.
- atomicnumber3 4y ago
  I don't think it would be held against you? Especially if it was "going back" for it. I think the uncharitable view people take of a Bachelors followed immediately by a masters but with no PhD is that they presumably weren't planning to go for a PhD, and given that, had the choice between a) doing 2 more years of school for very tenuous benefit and b) going directly into a job where entry level pays 1.5x+ the median household income in many states. And they chose a). So I think the uncharitable interpretation is then that the person was afraid of entering the adult world or felt like they couldn't hack it.
  - dcow 4y ago
    Or that they washed out of a PhD.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Lets face it: There is so much theory crammed into some CS degrees, bachelor and master degrees, that students do not get to code much. Real coding is often learned by oneself in side projects or on the job. If students do not engage in side projects, how do we expect them to be proficient computer programmers out of university? However, I see this as a failure of CS education. Our work is with computers. If we do not teach, how to use the tool we work with properly, then we have failed. I know CS is not only developing software, but also a lot about the theory, but it should not exclude practice of working with the most commonly used tool, which graduates will use, the computer. Often even things are taught wrongly (do not get me started on "every noun is a class" kind of teaching of OOP), by people, who have not developed a single larger code base for decades. That said, the industry has at least in that regard caught up a bit, and realized, that fresh from university most people do not write good code immediately.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  Imagine what happens when that person doesn’t leave academia to have the opportunity to learn to code. They just stay on. And end up teaching coding.
- nebulousthree 4y ago
  Your argument is akin to saying "there's so much theory crammed into Astronomy that students do not get to look through a telescope much" CS fundamentally is not about computers. It's about math and the flow of information between theoretical machines. Computers just happen to be a physical implement. The idea that universities should teach to develop industry-fit individuals is just an extension of commodifying university education. Why not let the industry handle training for what they need their people to do, and let universities focus on their intended goal: create more university professors/researchers. What about moving the responsibility (and financial risk) off students' backs and to the corporations that want to exploit the knowledge gained in a degree through apprenticeship and learning to code through experience?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    We don't do it because it means trade schools for developers. Which, in truth, is exactly what 90% of what we do in the industry needs. But it's not glamorous; it's not a degree. Trade schools are for proles, and we aren't proles, now, how could we possibly be?

RHSeeger 4y ago

> has anyone here ever looked at a resume with an MSc in CS and said "Yep, I bet this person knows how to write code well" A Masters in CS doesn't tell me the person knows how to code well, but it does tell me that they are _more likely_ to - Have had experience with a wider variety of algorithms, data structures, and general coding concepts - Have written code to perform more complex things - Written code for someone "outside of a classroom" Certainly the last two are more directly accomplished by actually being in the workforce. However, an educational environment is a far better source for the first one. Now, I'm not saying having a Masters is necessarily _better_ for a developer but - Given two developers with no work experience, one with a Masters and one with a Bachelors; I would generally assume the one with the Masters is a better developer. - Given two developers with a similar amount of work experience, one with a Masters and one with a Bachelors; I would generally assume the one with the Masters is a better developer. - Given two developers, one with a Masters and no work experience, one with a Bachelors a couple years of work experience; I wouldn't make any assumptions about their skill (they're certainly different, but I wouldn't assume one is a better developer than the other). The same logic holds true for me when people try to convince me that a degree in CSci offers no benefit at all, and that it's better to just self study and start working. There's nothing you can learn during a degree that _can't_ be learned by self study; but there's a lot of things that are much more likely to be learned in an academic environment.

herval 4y ago

Depends on the school and depends on the person. The same way many companies in the US assume any grad from MIT is a good engineer, there are companies who look at resumes w/ an MSc and bump them up. From personal experience, MScs are particularly well-regarded in Brazil, for instance.

nightpool 4y ago
My question wasn't "do companies think that an MSc is good" but rather "Have you, personally, ever noticed that a candidate with an MSc was better than a candidate with equivalent experience without an MSc". I think we can all agree that whether a company thinks something is good is completely unrelated to whether that thing actually improves your programming ability.
- herval 4y ago
  Yes, some times.

morelisp 4y ago

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's always the claim? If all you're doing is the courses, those are accessible to 4th year undergraduates in every university I know. To a person, everyone I've interviewed who did an MSc for the coursework had to because they finished their BSc with minimum effort and no one was interested in hiring them. Even worse is when you see 4y BSc, 2y work, 1y MSc.

comfypotato 4y ago
I think an accelerated bs/ms might be another exception you should consider. (This being when a bs student can do another year immediately following to get their ms.) It makes sense on ROI as many companies have HR departments more likely to get you into the interview process, and then it’s often a slightly higher starting role. Also, from a knowledge standpoint, some graduate classes help practical abilities only. A 500-level databases course, for example, isn’t research-oriented. It just teaches more advanced topics that might actually matter in the workplace (an intuitive understanding of how/where to use an index, more complicated examples of projects with database connections, etc.). I fall into the case of your first exception, so I’m not actually sure undergraduate courses don’t teach these things. I’ve had a few 500-level classes that had absolutely no research orientation (“object oriented design and development” is another example of a class where the projects are just super-complicated examples of what you experience in industry). Pursuing an accelerated degree shows that the student wasn’t careless in thinking research was something they wanted to do.
- morelisp 4y ago
  Undergraduates in CS can fill their senior year with 500 level courses easily. Motivated ones also much of their junior year. Why would I take the applicant who did it five over the ones who did it in four? Worrying about the “MSc” label at the end for the same work is just credentialism.

bcrosby95 4y ago

I've thought of going back for an MSc because it sounds kinda fun. Although probably in math rather than CS. I never thought it would be held against me though. Seems weird.

atomicnumber3 4y ago
I don't think it would be held against you? Especially if it was "going back" for it. I think the uncharitable view people take of a Bachelors followed immediately by a masters but with no PhD is that they presumably weren't planning to go for a PhD, and given that, had the choice between a) doing 2 more years of school for very tenuous benefit and b) going directly into a job where entry level pays 1.5x+ the median household income in many states. And they chose a). So I think the uncharitable interpretation is then that the person was afraid of entering the adult world or felt like they couldn't hack it.
- dcow 4y ago
  Or that they washed out of a PhD.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Lets face it: There is so much theory crammed into some CS degrees, bachelor and master degrees, that students do not get to code much. Real coding is often learned by oneself in side projects or on the job. If students do not engage in side projects, how do we expect them to be proficient computer programmers out of university? However, I see this as a failure of CS education. Our work is with computers. If we do not teach, how to use the tool we work with properly, then we have failed. I know CS is not only developing software, but also a lot about the theory, but it should not exclude practice of working with the most commonly used tool, which graduates will use, the computer. Often even things are taught wrongly (do not get me started on "every noun is a class" kind of teaching of OOP), by people, who have not developed a single larger code base for decades. That said, the industry has at least in that regard caught up a bit, and realized, that fresh from university most people do not write good code immediately.

randomsearch 4y ago
Imagine what happens when that person doesn’t leave academia to have the opportunity to learn to code. They just stay on. And end up teaching coding.
nebulousthree 4y ago
Your argument is akin to saying "there's so much theory crammed into Astronomy that students do not get to look through a telescope much" CS fundamentally is not about computers. It's about math and the flow of information between theoretical machines. Computers just happen to be a physical implement. The idea that universities should teach to develop industry-fit individuals is just an extension of commodifying university education. Why not let the industry handle training for what they need their people to do, and let universities focus on their intended goal: create more university professors/researchers. What about moving the responsibility (and financial risk) off students' backs and to the corporations that want to exploit the knowledge gained in a degree through apprenticeship and learning to code through experience?
- int_19h 4y ago
  We don't do it because it means trade schools for developers. Which, in truth, is exactly what 90% of what we do in the industry needs. But it's not glamorous; it's not a degree. Trade schools are for proles, and we aren't proles, now, how could we possibly be?