[nvarsj]

Yes it's not just masters and it's not just indians. I think everyone who has been in tech long enough can give many examples of people with great backgrounds who just weren't great engineers. Education is a signal for sure though I think - it shows a certain willingness to dedicate oneself, and a certain level of intelligence and aptitude to attain, and getting a M.S. or PhD or even a B.S. from a hard school is going to filter out a lot of people already.

I also think a graduate degree is necessary for certain types of work. For just bog standard programming jobs where you can read a web page to learn the language/framework/library, sure you don't need it. But for other types of roles (quant roles, more research oriented, ML, anything tech cutting edge that requires theoretical understanding), an M.S. or Ph.D. is going to be a gatekeeper whether you want it to or not.