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Comment by digisign | Hacker News Reader

There was a post on bigtech salary levels recently. Each promotion was equivalent to $100k or more, there were many levels. Hiring into a director position might double it. A degree makes these things substantially more likely. He'll probably have his money back within six months.

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>> A degree makes these things substantially more likely.

There is a bit of a leap from more likely on a low probability event to probably will pay off their debt. Getting promoted at a Faang company takes a good bit of work. Becoming a director is not something most people can expect. I’ve never heard of a promo committee at a Faang Corp take a degree into consideration and I’ve known plenty of director level people at faang companies who had no grad degree. If the person learns some useful new skills that could open doors. The credential might also help open some doors that an obscure college would not. But saying they are likely to make it back in 6 months is a bit of a stretch.

Budget was under $50k, which you can make in a few months at a tech job. Nice raise will pay for that nicely in no time.

If you don't think a lot of places aren't gatekeeping on degrees, you haven't looked at many.

To be more clear for folks that think it is an absolute filter, of course it is not. I remember about half of hiring pipelines ending on that point last time I was looking. Was 100% of the top companies with too many applicants however.

There are places that gatekeep on degrees as in "you must have a Bachelor's degree" or even "you must have a B.S. in Computer Science", but there are almost none that are gatekeeping on graduate degrees. I've worked at several FAANG-tier corporations, have friends at all of the others, and have interacted with all sorts of smaller companies. I can count on one hand the number of people I've worked with with graduate degrees, and all of them had their base degree in something other than computer science.

Correct for IC jobs. When you want to move up thru the "glass ceiling" to make the real money, guess who they'll pick of two similar candidates? The one with the better degree.

I'm really not convinced. I looked, and examples of my reporting chain at various points in my career:

Company A: Lead (yes, but undergrad in EE), Manager (no), GM (no), VP (?), SVP (no), President (yes), CEO (dropped out of MBA)

Company B: Lead (no), Manager (yes), Director (?), Senior Director (no), Senior Director (yes), VP (no), SVP (MBA), CEO (yes)

The plural of anecdote is not data, and I'm not a director, but a cursory comparison of senior leadership and LinkedIn doesn't leave me convinced that a graduate degree matters. Most of the folks who have one got one back in the 90s where things were very different.

Degrees are more important today than they were in the past, preferably a brand name one. Part of the reason they have been getting more expensive.

https://www.aplu.org/our-work/5-archived-projects/college-co...

This one says 400k+ higher lifetime earnings with "advanced degree". The source from georgetown says they are less likely to loser their job in a recession as well.

No, the real world is not black and white and this is not a guarrantee. But, get an advanced degree looks like an easy power-up at the prices OP was willing to pay.

> If you don't think a lot of places aren't gatekeeping on degrees, you haven't looked at many.

I can only think of aerospace, and other engineering-not-software companies that do this. They also don’t pay sw developers much to begin with, so this looks like a very false economy.

At the last start up I worked at, the director of Engineering had a BA in English.

One of the best programmers I ever worked with had a BA in Music.

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