[austin-cheney]

A masters degree is excellent for gaining opportunities doing more interesting work, but otherwise is an extremely expensive way to enter tech.

I am a mid-40s developer without a masters, but have a former military and cyber defense background. Most of my programming experience is in JavaScript, which is super low barrier to entry and generally stacked with beginners and beginner experts that never get past entry level capabilities. At this point in my career, in this line of work in JavaScript, I have to make hard choices:

1. Make good money working with people that cannot really program but nonetheless consider themselves engineers with hyper insecurity because they are reliant upon a massive tech stack

2. Make less money working with more mature people doing different work

With that as my options I have to make some hard decisions about if I even want to advance