[thruway516]

My 2 cents as someone with a related masters. Imo a masters is a quick way for someone without experience or no viable way to get that experience to quickly gain rough and dirty exposure in the hope that that will open doors to gaining said experience. That is a sentencious way of saying I think it is inferior to actual experience in the field building products, learning from that and maybe doing some self learning on the side to cover the gaps in your knowledge. A masters will not provide you with very deep theoretical knowledge - if what you want is deep expertise you should be looking at a PhD. That said there are benefits from doing one at a school like Stanford or MIT as they tend to be quite rigorous and you might pick up intangible benefits such as new study habits or whatever one picks up from being around a lot of smart motivated people, if you didnt already attend a prestigious school for college. Also a lot of employers value a masters degree so independently of wether it actually improves your skill or knowledge the paper might be worth having. I do think you can self teach though. These days its easy to find an online course or mooc that will give you enough to be reasonably well versed if you're not looking for deep phd level knowledge.