Postgraduate education for developers?

carlmango11

What do you guys think of developers going back to college to do a Masters or Ph.D? Is there much point or is experience more valuable? Would a company pay more for someone with a postgraduate degree?

srsly78

Nope. Better off getting experience. Postgrad only if you want to get into academic stuff, in which case be prepared for lousy pay until you get tenure (which is unlikely since there are a lot more phds than tenured positions).

ChRoMe

Experience trumps everything.

Smoggy

The Ph.D will help you become a CS lecturer, but that's about all.

The industry moves so fast that the time out of your job could be seen as a negative.

Creamy Goodness

a year's experience is worth way more than a piece of paper.

that said I have contracted in some large enterprises in Ireland where I got to know some of their processes and their junior developers all seemed geared towards going back to get a masters/ph.d on the company dime because it would get them a pay rise.

if only they knew jumping ship and getting out of such a place would have the same effect without wasting valuable time :pac:

Sparks

PhDs, unless you want to move into academia or R&D, are not a good use of your time. I say that having spent a few years chasing one.

MScs are a little bit more gray - it really depends on the MSc topic, the course itself, and how you're doing it. I know a lot of people who've gone for various kinds of masters degrees from MBAs to MSc's in specific topics, but they've all done them as evening courses. For them, it worked - they were chasing promotions or pay raises and got them and the degree helped. But that doesn't mean it's a universal rule and honestly I'm not sure that a fulltime masters degree makes any sense in our industry given the premium put on experience.

The Corinthian

I went back to do a post-grad in computer science, but then again, my primary degree wasn't actually in IT, so that's one of the principle reasons I did so.

Even then, at that point I'd been in IT for over ten years, at that stage, so few would have likely been looking at whether I'd even gone to university, let alone what I'd studies, given a decade of experience. But that's in Ireland (or most Anglophone nations); go to Germany, France, Italy, Austria (especially), and so on and suddenly degrees do matter. In some cases a lot.

Finally, any academic (and thus any additional) qualification can end up pushing you over the edge between getting and not getting a job. Especially at executive level - once you start getting your bio on company literature, that's when having a few extra letters after your name begins to become more important.

Brussels Sprout

I used a Masters as a conversion to get me into IT as I had no background in it and no experience. If I had an undergrad in it and I knew I wanted to go into industry I wouldn't have really seen the point.

Tar.Aldarion

I found my masters to be very helpful and also favourably looked upon, a phd would be pointless in most cases I'd say. That said, a girl here has a phd and it definitely helped her get this job as they needed somebody with expertise in that area etc. So it's not impossible.

fergalr

carlmango11 wrote: »

What do you guys think of developers going back to college to do a Masters or Ph.D?

I went back to do a PhD about 5 years after my undergrad (CS TCD)

carlmango11 wrote: »

Is there much point or is experience more valuable?

Well, after 5 years experience, the additional value of additional experience diminishes, IMO, all other things being equal.

But that really depends. 10 years doing the same job in a boring company isn't as good as 3 years experience growing and learning new stuff.
Experience isn't fungible.


Also, it depends what you want to do.
I learned and grew a lot doing a PhD. My intellectual confidence grew, I got better at tackling hard problems etc. Its a personal thing, but I value that.

Also, depends what you do in your PhD. Lot of people do PhDs and get very little from them.

PhDs are often pretty painful, though (in the 'pain and suffering' sense, not in the 'using vim is painful' sense (although they are also that)), even if they go pretty smoothly (which mine did).

Its a very different proposition to an MSc; be very sure its the right choice before signing up.

carlmango11 wrote: »

Would a company pay more for someone with a postgraduate degree?

In general, no, not in this country. Maybe for an MSc vs. non-CS undergrad.

Pretty marginal salary benefit for a PhD over an MSc in general, unless its the case that you are specifically sough after for your specific and rare research knowledge. (This is unlikely to happen).


Some people are saying that you can get jobs as lecturers with PhD - it might be a necessary condition, but its not a sufficient condition. Again, statistically, forget about permanent lecturing jobs in Ireland for PhDs.

conor.hogan.2

fergalr wrote: »

Pretty marginal salary benefit for a PhD over an MSc in general, unless its the case that you are specifically sough after for your specific and rare research knowledge. (This is unlikely to happen).

But isn't this the point of a PHD? To break new ground,

But also you should not be doing a PHD for its salary benefits anyway.

fergalr

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

But also you should not be doing a PHD for its salary benefits anyway.

Yes, because they don't exist.


I'm not saying PhDs are bad. I would advise my younger self to still do one.
But they are only a good idea in very specific cases.

(Wanting an academic career is not one of those specific cases, tbh, unless you are willing to take very long shots because nothing else will make you happy (and hence accept you will probably end up unhappy (although you are probably wrong))).

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

But isn't this the point of a PHD? To break new ground,

Hmmm - maybe?

Like, that's kind of a big question, and it needs to be contextualised a bit.

I could give good arguments against the 'breaking new ground' perspective.

- Most PhDs dont break any new ground. Most human activity breaks hardly any significantly new ground anywhere.
- Most of most of good science is about incremental checking of what people already know (or are pretty sure they know), so that certainty in knowledge slowly accretes over time.
- You could probably make equally good arguments that a PhD is a program of vocational training, or a bizarre initiation ritual, or even (traditionally) a multi-year hazing process.

And thats just the good PhDs; there's a lot of nonsense done, too.

Sparks

fergalr wrote: »

Some people are saying that you can get jobs as lecturers with PhD - it might be a necessary condition, but its not a sufficient condition. Again, statistically, forget about permanent lecturing jobs in Ireland for PhDs.

Yeah - about a decade or so ago, the powers that be decided they'd look good come election time if they had created a wodge of new PhD's.... problem was, they didn't create the positions for those PhDs to take on after getting the PhD and the academic world in Ireland's been saturated with them ever since. If you do want to do the academic route, you can -- but you'll probably wind up working abroad for a while as a postdoc first.

Sparks

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

But isn't this the point of a PHD? To break new ground

No, that's not the point of a PhD at all.
In fact, any good supervisor will sit you down before you start and point this out to you. The point of a PhD is to show you've learnt to do research yourself. Yes, there will be a small novel aspect to your PhD -- but the key word here is small. As in, a very very small increment on a known idea, or applying a known idea to a new problem, or something like that. Anyone who started a PhD intending to discover something new or inventing something huge and groundbreaking would be warned off with a baseball bat for their own good by any supervisor worth their salt.

Sparks

fergalr wrote: »

or even (traditionally) a multi-year hazing process.

You have no idea how much sense that just made of several years of my life

conor.hogan.2

Sparks wrote: »

No, that's not the point of a PhD at all.
In fact, any good supervisor will sit you down before you start and point this out to you. The point of a PhD is to show you've learnt to do research yourself. Yes, there will be a small novel aspect to your PhD -- but the key word here is small. As in, a very very small increment on a known idea, or applying a known idea to a new problem, or something like that. Anyone who started a PhD intending to discover something new or inventing something huge and groundbreaking would be warned off with a baseball bat for their own good by any supervisor worth their salt.

Small yes, but still something and not just doing it to show you can research for yourself surely?

Sparks

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

Small yes, but still something and not just doing it to show you can research for yourself surely?

In theory, yes. In practice, you're really overestimating the size of the novelty. Absolutely everyone does. For example, just about everyone's PhD in CS boils down to either a number or a yes/no answer at the end of the day. The point of it isn't that answer though, but the road to that answer and how you evaluate it with regard to the state of the art in the field. Any hugely new research waits for the postdoc stage.