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Originally Posted by pwalker8
In the computer industry, a masters is pretty much useless. I've been in the industry for 30 years and have yet to see a job were a master's is even remotely useful, much less required. There are a ton of programmers out there who either have a bachelor's from a diploma mill in China or India, an associate degree from a technical school or no degree at all. It's all work experience. About half the programmers that I know who have a degree have a degree in something not even remotely associated with computers. A lot of big corporations require a degree just as a filter for HR, but the smaller shops don't care as long as you know your stuff and have the work experience.
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This way of thinking is exactly the reason why I see such a shitload of crap code that is hacked together; it works, but nobody knows why.
While you don't need a master's degree for many IT jobs, a bachelor often IS required, or you'll only attract people who taught themselves to write code. They don't have the slightest idea how to design a piece of software. They'll just start writing code and keep hacking until it, somehow, works.
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There are some specialized jobs (most academia, but some research) that requires a Ph D, and of course, the more fancy titles you can claim as a consultant, the better. Not because the actual work requires it, but because the people you are selling yourself to are impressed with fancy titles and degrees.
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I'm not selling anything. I write embedded software. If a bug is encountered, an entire factory can come to a standstill. It is imperative that someone can log into the machine, see the status of all the hardware *AND* software parts, and quickly find the part of the code that creates the problem.
Worst case, an entirely new subprocedure or component has to be written *on the spot* to get rid of some extremely nasty bugs, as a drop-in replacement for the old one. That can only be done if a piece of software is designed well. If procedures are entangled because the code was hacked together due to lack of good design, it's impossible to fix.