As a developer I feel my career advancement stagnating in its current trajectory.

This feels silly to ask, but is there merit to obtaining a masters degree as a software/design engineer to get to staff level one day?

My gut says experience and street cred matter way more but I'm curious what others think of the ROI.

I have a masters degree in ML and it was useful at the time of the last deep learning cycle to get to spend a lot of time thinking about ML/AI when other people weren’t.

Besides the Ivy League pedigree it wasn’t really helpful as a credential.

I still recommend AI phds if you can excel at it and want to do AI research full time.

Re design Eng maybe talk to CMU HCI grads? Seems like most prestigious program.