[otras]

The main question is your main motivation and the tradeoffs with respect to time, energy, and money. I think it would be helpful if you could expand on your motivations a little more.

For your personal knowledge: do you find that classes enable you you to learn better? Have you tried self-teaching things or taking MOOC classes on your own? Does the structure help? What do you want to know that you don't know now (unknown unknowns notwithstanding), and how do you think classes would help?

For making your profile more appealing to companies: what kind of work do you want to do? For example, if you want to do PhD level research work, you'll probably need a PhD. For that work you're interested in, have you found your current profile is limiting you? You mention you don't want to be a SWE, so it would be interesting to hear which work you _are_ interested in.

Source: I went through the process of doing a part-time MSCS while working full time as a SWE (details at https://alexanderell.is/posts/mscs/ if you're interested) and have way too many opinions about it.

[jnac]

I actually read your blog on this while applying :). It was very helpful and part of my initial decision was exactly your quote to yourself at the top of the post. I do think I underestimated the time tradeoff as I generally breezed through my undergraduate coursework.

These are all good points to consider, and I definitely think I learn better & am more motivated when learning via projects, rather than the classroom environment. Work is more of a question mark, am on the lookout for what I want to do after having found analytics work unrewarding. Have considered SWE and product management, I just feel very _behind_ in the former (doubly so in research). Additionally I do feel I would generally enjoy a more social role. Regardless, thank you for the reply, this is a good framework for thinking about if this will be valuable or not.

Edit: Additionally, reading your post again: really like the point about figuring out what you don't know. Right now there seems to be so much 'magic' that I cannot comprehend; definitely feel that satisfying that curiosity is one reason to push through.

[otras]

Ha small world! Glad it has been helpful :)

That makes a lot of sense, and I definitely identify with that feeling of the magic. I felt like there were a dozen caves I knew about, each one with an intimidating name ("compilers", "networking", "machine learning", etc.), and before the MS, I knew these caves existed but didn't know much about them. Taking the classes was like a guided tour into the first sections of the cave (usually with a map and flashlight provided by the instructor). It was like they gave me a feel for both the general layout and the true depth of the caves, even if I only saw a bit of each one. It would take a PhD to fully explore just one path in one cave all the way to the end, but the classes helped me become more familiar with what each one generally looks like and how they're laid out. I think just as importantly, they also helped to give me the knowledge and tools to go deeper into each cave (or new caves) on my own and the confidence to know that I could if I wanted to.

The only other thing I'd say is that software engineering can be more social than you may think, at least it has been for me, especially when compared to what I naively thought software work was like. I don't have the blog post written to link you to yet, but, depending on the company, it's definitely not just you and the computer.

I'm pretty biased being on this side of the courses, but feel free to reach out if you want to chat more!