In my own hiring decisions, I also don't pay that much attention to education. But I don't have the last say, and unfortunately, there are a lot of companies th

In my own hiring decisions, I also don't pay that much attention to education. But I don't have the last say, and unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that basically all but require an advanced degree to be able to progress in your career track past the 10 year mark. Small businesses and startups may not have as much HR mechanization to get in the way, but unless you have an in through networking, such places can be very hard to find, especially if you are looking for a place that is at all stable or paying a competitive salary. I have 20 years of experience in software development, with the last 10 having various degrees of management responsibility as I've been "the most responsible adult in the room" for a bunch of small companies. My last job ended when the company lost funding for my position. Now, at my 2k+ people current employer, I've already been administratively shoehorned into my current position (managing a development team), responsible for level X but titled at level (X-1) because I don't have a master's. My level is higher than most other people in my group, but the actual job I'm doing is a level higher, which would come with a very, very significant pay increase, because it's breaching the barrier of being primarily and individual contributor to being primarily a manager. My boss has said that my promotion track is basically frozen until I get one. The company will help pay for one, and there are a lot of people in my group that have taken advantage of the benefit, so it's not bullshit. But I really don't feel like I'd be doing it to learn anything, it'd just be for credentialing. Back when I first started my career, the only people I knew who had master's degrees were working in honest to goodness scientific research, or C-suite executives. We had ICs that didn't have CS degrees at all. Those days are clearly over.