7 ms·

The case against CS master's degrees

25 points by ozanonay 6y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
And then there's my old manager who found a negative correlation between a programmer's ability and them holding a PhD in CS. FWIW, he had a MS in Software Engineering himself and he said that the correlation only seemed to hold for CS PhD's, not PhD's in other sciences. My department had a number of PhD's, but only one in CS and that one was hired a few years after that manager left. Correlation isn't causation and all that, but it does bias you a certain way.
supercasio 6y ago
It's sad that his page about self-studying CS [1] does not include any book specific to the Theory of Computation and Computational Complexity. [1]: https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/
xhkkffbf 6y ago
I hate to be super-negative, but I'm not even sure a bachelors in CS is a good idea. Oh sure, you learn a few good things along the way, but then the professors start dragging you down their favorite theoretical paths. I'm all for philosophizing and navel gazing, but there's not much practical in things like lambda calculus, NP-completeness and some of the other topics. To make matters worse, these pursuits can confuse the brain. I know one fancy CS major who dismissed a problem as unsolveable because it was NP-complete. He missed the fact that the dimensions of the problem were such that a quick heuristic did perfectly fine. The sad thing is that large parts of the curriculum aren't that valuable. Data structures used to be my favorite, but today it's not that important because we stick everything in hash tables or database tables. We rarely use LISTS! The same goes for compilers. No one writes a compiler any more. Apple just repurposed LLVM when they made Swift. But all of the undergraduates have to pull their hair out making toy compilers and for what end? Most of the CS curriculum is pretty extraneous. This is why many companies are deliberately hiring technically competent people from tech fields like physics or chemistry. They learn practical skills to analyze their data-- the kind of practical skills needed by corporations not theory heads.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  How many people will get your sarcasm? Why, I could add to your post that even hacker news no longer serves its purpose to be at the central core of computing ;-)
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  I don't know if anyone (anymore) thinks that computer science is the same as software development. Knowing the latest library APIs, versus doing research to find a faster hash sort, are two different areas, IMO. I also wonder about the different industries and how they compare (SaaS vs CGI vs HFT). I think if you want to forge new roads in programming, a little theoretical studying doesn't hurt, so why not explore a university degree. I also do not enjoy the endless debates around self-taught versus schooling. I've seen real-life anecdotes from both viewpoints and find that it's too subjective for anyone to declare anything from either side. I personally don't recommend people jump out and grab a CS degree, but there are some good programs out there.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    So why not explore a university degree? Let me give you 300,000 reasons-- in other words, the price (in dollars) at a fancy university for said degree. I'm not debating whether anyone should study this. I'm just saying that people who want to get jobs shouldn't need to study it. If you want to do the theoretical stuff, have at it. I'm just saying that it's failed my team as often as it has helped. If the theoretical model doesn't match the problem exactly, you can get the WRONG answer as that NP-complete obsessed dude did when he didn't look for a heuristic.
    - odyssey7 6y ago
      > the dimensions of the problem were such that a quick heuristic did perfectly fine. This is also a theoretical model that they teach in CS programs.
      - xhkkffbf 6y ago
_wldu 6y ago
The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.
- daniel-thompson 6y ago
  OMSCS student here. I agree with the parent. However, the one downside of the program is that since the marginal cost of admitting an additional student is very low relative to the tuition amount, GT has an incentive to not be very selective about who they let in. From a democratization-of-educational-opportunities perspective, that's good: if you can hack it, then you can hack it, regardless of what formal qualifications you might be missing. But this program is the real deal courseware-wise, and that results in a lot of those under-prepared students taking classes that they just can't keep up in. Lots of those students end up washing out of the program... after paying GT a semester or two of tuition. Example: in the Intro to OS course I'm about to finish, we started with 700+ students and are now down to about 340. The projects are typical schoolhouse stuff for systems programming: C programs that manage memory, use sockets, IPC constructs, pthreads, RPC libraries, etc. One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
  - throwlaplace 6y ago
    >One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger. Lol that's like the best way to debug C
    - yks 6y ago
      yep, 10+ years in industry and that's how I usually debug (and I know how to use a debugger).
gedy 6y ago
I really enjoyed Electrical & Computer Engineering, and took CS classes as electives. Felt the math and engineering courses grew my brain, and the CS courses were enough to get me into software. The CS majors I knew seemed to enjoy their choice less!
bryal 6y ago
Not everything has to be about work and employability. Some of us actually enjoy learning and exploring the more theoretical topics in CS.
- theamk 6y ago
  Sounds like you should be doing PhD then? At least in my university, MS students were usually paying full tuition, with the understanding that they'll take classes and leave for (presumably) high-paying job. On the other hand, PhD students were usually paying no tuition at all -- instead, after getting their masters-equivalent, they were expected to do the research for a few years and therefore "pay back" by advancing the science. (of course the fun fact was that one could drop out half-way from PhD program and get a MS degree.. but this did not happen very often)
  - bryal 6y ago
    Indeed, I've been considering getting a PhD. The situation in Sweden is quite different to yours however. To begin with, all university education is free, and we further get a student grant of ca. $300 USD / month and access to an almost free student loan for up to 6 years. PhD students all get a salary of ca. $3k USD / month. Also, here you don't get a PhD "instead" of a master's -- a master's is rather a prerequisite to getting a PhD, in practice if not formally. Generally, the path to a PhD in Sweden is: 3 years for bachelor's degree -> 2 years for master's -> 4 years for PhD.
commandlinefan 6y ago
What masters degree (or even undergraduate degree) is any of that not true of?
- Rury 6y ago
  Yeah, past a certain point you realize how shallow degrees are, as they're merely an organization's approval that you studied something and demonstrated some level of aptitude of it. Which is to say, you don't need a degree to study/learn things. Though that approval is helpful in opening doors to employment when you're young, it again is not needed when your history of experience, abilities, and work can do the same later in your career...
alexktz 6y ago
My CS masters completely changed my life. Would 100% recommend if you are open to learning a bunch of cool stuff.
- kixiQu 6y ago
  * if you are open to paying tens of thousands of dollars for learning a bunch of cool stuff
  - alexktz 6y ago
    Mine was £5000. UEA in the UK. It has paid for itself many, many times over since then.
liquidify 6y ago
I did a non-cs undergrad to cs grad path... It was hard. I wasn't admitted to the program without fulfilling almost all the core CS undergrad classes. This meant that between the prerequisites and the actual grad classes, I took over 120 credit hours of pure math and CS classes over the course of 5 years. Obviously not every school has the same demands as others, and there are certainly a lot of degree farms that take foreign students money and funnel them though, but I'm not sure that the authors points ring very true... certainly not for everyone.

25 points by ozanonay 6y ago

And then there's my old manager who found a negative correlation between a programmer's ability and them holding a PhD in CS. FWIW, he had a MS in Software Engineering himself and he said that the correlation only seemed to hold for CS PhD's, not PhD's in other sciences. My department had a number of PhD's, but only one in CS and that one was hired a few years after that manager left. Correlation isn't causation and all that, but it does bias you a certain way.

supercasio 6y ago

It's sad that his page about self-studying CS [1] does not include any book specific to the Theory of Computation and Computational Complexity. [1]: https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/

xhkkffbf 6y ago

I hate to be super-negative, but I'm not even sure a bachelors in CS is a good idea. Oh sure, you learn a few good things along the way, but then the professors start dragging you down their favorite theoretical paths. I'm all for philosophizing and navel gazing, but there's not much practical in things like lambda calculus, NP-completeness and some of the other topics. To make matters worse, these pursuits can confuse the brain. I know one fancy CS major who dismissed a problem as unsolveable because it was NP-complete. He missed the fact that the dimensions of the problem were such that a quick heuristic did perfectly fine. The sad thing is that large parts of the curriculum aren't that valuable. Data structures used to be my favorite, but today it's not that important because we stick everything in hash tables or database tables. We rarely use LISTS! The same goes for compilers. No one writes a compiler any more. Apple just repurposed LLVM when they made Swift. But all of the undergraduates have to pull their hair out making toy compilers and for what end? Most of the CS curriculum is pretty extraneous. This is why many companies are deliberately hiring technically competent people from tech fields like physics or chemistry. They learn practical skills to analyze their data-- the kind of practical skills needed by corporations not theory heads.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
How many people will get your sarcasm? Why, I could add to your post that even hacker news no longer serves its purpose to be at the central core of computing ;-)
adamredwoods 6y ago
I don't know if anyone (anymore) thinks that computer science is the same as software development. Knowing the latest library APIs, versus doing research to find a faster hash sort, are two different areas, IMO. I also wonder about the different industries and how they compare (SaaS vs CGI vs HFT). I think if you want to forge new roads in programming, a little theoretical studying doesn't hurt, so why not explore a university degree. I also do not enjoy the endless debates around self-taught versus schooling. I've seen real-life anecdotes from both viewpoints and find that it's too subjective for anyone to declare anything from either side. I personally don't recommend people jump out and grab a CS degree, but there are some good programs out there.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  So why not explore a university degree? Let me give you 300,000 reasons-- in other words, the price (in dollars) at a fancy university for said degree. I'm not debating whether anyone should study this. I'm just saying that people who want to get jobs shouldn't need to study it. If you want to do the theoretical stuff, have at it. I'm just saying that it's failed my team as often as it has helped. If the theoretical model doesn't match the problem exactly, you can get the WRONG answer as that NP-complete obsessed dude did when he didn't look for a heuristic.
  - odyssey7 6y ago
    > the dimensions of the problem were such that a quick heuristic did perfectly fine. This is also a theoretical model that they teach in CS programs.
    - xhkkffbf 6y ago

_wldu 6y ago

The Georgia Tech OMSCS program is very good and affordable (10K or less). It's also the 7th ranked CS program in the world. And, you can and do interact with professors, not just TAs. I'm an OMSCS grad. I would do it again and strongly recommend it. I think programs like it are the future of higher education.

daniel-thompson 6y ago
OMSCS student here. I agree with the parent. However, the one downside of the program is that since the marginal cost of admitting an additional student is very low relative to the tuition amount, GT has an incentive to not be very selective about who they let in. From a democratization-of-educational-opportunities perspective, that's good: if you can hack it, then you can hack it, regardless of what formal qualifications you might be missing. But this program is the real deal courseware-wise, and that results in a lot of those under-prepared students taking classes that they just can't keep up in. Lots of those students end up washing out of the program... after paying GT a semester or two of tuition. Example: in the Intro to OS course I'm about to finish, we started with 700+ students and are now down to about 340. The projects are typical schoolhouse stuff for systems programming: C programs that manage memory, use sockets, IPC constructs, pthreads, RPC libraries, etc. One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger.
- throwlaplace 6y ago
  >One of the guys on the class slack just posted that when testing & debugging the projects, he just printed stuff to stdout... for the whole semester... because he doesn't know - and didn't bother to learn - how to use a debugger. Lol that's like the best way to debug C
  - yks 6y ago
    yep, 10+ years in industry and that's how I usually debug (and I know how to use a debugger).

gedy 6y ago

I really enjoyed Electrical & Computer Engineering, and took CS classes as electives. Felt the math and engineering courses grew my brain, and the CS courses were enough to get me into software. The CS majors I knew seemed to enjoy their choice less!

bryal 6y ago

Not everything has to be about work and employability. Some of us actually enjoy learning and exploring the more theoretical topics in CS.

theamk 6y ago
Sounds like you should be doing PhD then? At least in my university, MS students were usually paying full tuition, with the understanding that they'll take classes and leave for (presumably) high-paying job. On the other hand, PhD students were usually paying no tuition at all -- instead, after getting their masters-equivalent, they were expected to do the research for a few years and therefore "pay back" by advancing the science. (of course the fun fact was that one could drop out half-way from PhD program and get a MS degree.. but this did not happen very often)
- bryal 6y ago
  Indeed, I've been considering getting a PhD. The situation in Sweden is quite different to yours however. To begin with, all university education is free, and we further get a student grant of ca. $300 USD / month and access to an almost free student loan for up to 6 years. PhD students all get a salary of ca. $3k USD / month. Also, here you don't get a PhD "instead" of a master's -- a master's is rather a prerequisite to getting a PhD, in practice if not formally. Generally, the path to a PhD in Sweden is: 3 years for bachelor's degree -> 2 years for master's -> 4 years for PhD.

commandlinefan 6y ago

What masters degree (or even undergraduate degree) is any of that not true of?

Rury 6y ago
Yeah, past a certain point you realize how shallow degrees are, as they're merely an organization's approval that you studied something and demonstrated some level of aptitude of it. Which is to say, you don't need a degree to study/learn things. Though that approval is helpful in opening doors to employment when you're young, it again is not needed when your history of experience, abilities, and work can do the same later in your career...

alexktz 6y ago

My CS masters completely changed my life. Would 100% recommend if you are open to learning a bunch of cool stuff.

kixiQu 6y ago
* if you are open to paying tens of thousands of dollars for learning a bunch of cool stuff
- alexktz 6y ago
  Mine was £5000. UEA in the UK. It has paid for itself many, many times over since then.

liquidify 6y ago

I did a non-cs undergrad to cs grad path... It was hard. I wasn't admitted to the program without fulfilling almost all the core CS undergrad classes. This meant that between the prerequisites and the actual grad classes, I took over 120 credit hours of pure math and CS classes over the course of 5 years. Obviously not every school has the same demands as others, and there are certainly a lot of degree farms that take foreign students money and funnel them though, but I'm not sure that the authors points ring very true... certainly not for everyone.