Developer: Should I Do Master Degree??

[Zila]

Hi Guys,

I am a Full stack software developer (Java+Angular) with hounors degree. I have been working for 4 years now. I am thinking of doing Masters degree in software engineering with UNISA. I want to know if it worth it to do master as developer or should i just do lot of certificate like AWS, Torgef, etc.

Thanks,

 

[cguy]

It certainly could be worthwhile. I would say definitely if you want to do more CS, HPC, numerical, ML, etc. related work in your career.

For web and/or (non-HPC) cloud, the benefit is harder to say for someone with 4 years experience. It may help you emigrate though, if that’s a goal.

I did my MSc in the 90’s which got me into advanced CS and research, which has served me very well up to now.

 

[slimeball]

Having a masters is certainly better than not having one. That said, I doubt it will make much of a difference to an employer after 4+ years of experience especially for full stack roles. Also having a masters doesn't make you a better developer, it gives you a broader academic grounding but there are just as many low quality devs -- with masters degrees.

I tend to think of masters applying to more R&D type roles.

 

[s0lar]

Always good to have as decent a qualification as you can muster. Experience trumps qualifications though. I just joined a team and one of the members has a comp sci doctorate. Was weird seeing her email signature as Dr, but her job title is junior analyst.

 

[cguy]

Always good to have as decent a qualification as you can muster. Experience trumps qualifications though. I just joined a team and one of the members has a comp sci doctorate. Was weird seeing her email signature as Dr, but her job title is junior analyst.

There is still a large element of thesis “topic” here.

Getting research and technical experience in an advanced research topic is super valuable - far more so than any experience one is likely to get in the work place, straight out of a 3 or 4 year degree.

That said, the wrong choice of topic can even be detrimental. I know plenty of people who have selected such fluffy topics, that by the time they finished their doctorates, they had mostly forgotten how to code. More than likely, these people also wouldn’t have been capable of doing more technical MSc/PhD work.

While the above really depends on the supervisor and student, there is a tendency for more “hard core” topics to be chosen at better universities. I’ve been really impressed by the postgraduates from places like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, etc. Places like UCT and WITS are more of a mix, where some topics are great, actual science topics, while others tend to be things like “A Social Media Platform for Informal Settlements”, or “Digital Storytelling” or such.