[sarah_eu]

I'll expand on this by adding that at the beginning of your career you're often happy to be doing any paid work related to your degree. After time you want a combination of interesting work, independence (autonomy) and scope for the future. You find this combination more often with research institutes and university labs. A Masters can prepare your for this route, but only if you go hard with it, and if it's specialised and not in generic software engineering. I'm thinking something like Robotics / Mechatronics, Computer Vision.