is Master’s a good move for me? /u/fakeArushB CSCQ protests reddit

I graduated in 2023, spent my junior and senior year at a very good school in the US, transitioned into tech during my junior year and completed CS minor coursework, contributed to OSS, participated and won in many hackathons during college.

Upon graduation, I returned home to my third world country, then I got a remote part-time job as web dev for a research group in one of good American colleges abroad.

I tried to do a startup, shut it down this summer, started recruiting and got a “real” software dev job at a local company (SAAS for gov. procurement) in August. My new job is really good paying and has all the elements of real software company: we have our own infra with server racks and stuff, there is some legacy code, codebase is not small (around 1.5M lines of code), our internal libraries, and very good devs. I would dare to say level of work and competence of people in my company is on par with the workers in the US.

I have been struggling + learning a lot on my job and I really like both the challenges and people I work with. But I do not like being in my third world and still have a FOMO over returning home and not trying to stay in the US. I am contemplating doing a grad school in the US in CS while I am still young, learn more topics in CS (I really enjoy it), have another year of college experience that was taken away from me by covid, and try to get a job in the US.

By the time I start grad school, I will have one full year of ‘real’ software job experience and am thinking that I will be competitive compared to other new grads. I am aware that tech market is not doing great, but my gut tells me it is recovering: interest rates going down, crypto winter is over, no more big layoffs.

Is grad school a good move for me? Should it it avoided? I would love to hear your perspective. Thanks!

I graduated in 2023, spent my junior and senior year at a very good school in the US, transitioned into tech during my junior year and completed CS minor coursework, contributed to OSS, participated and won in many hackathons during college.

Upon graduation, I returned home to my third world country, then I got a remote part-time job as web dev for a research group in one of good American colleges abroad.

I tried to do a startup, shut it down this summer, started recruiting and got a “real” software dev job at a local company (SAAS for gov. procurement) in August. My new job is really good paying and has all the elements of real software company: we have our own infra with server racks and stuff, there is some legacy code, codebase is not small (around 1.5M lines of code), our internal libraries, and very good devs. I would dare to say level of work and competence of people in my company is on par with the workers in the US.

I have been struggling + learning a lot on my job and I really like both the challenges and people I work with. But I do not like being in my third world and still have a FOMO over returning home and not trying to stay in the US. I am contemplating doing a grad school in the US in CS while I am still young, learn more topics in CS (I really enjoy it), have another year of college experience that was taken away from me by covid, and try to get a job in the US.

By the time I start grad school, I will have one full year of ‘real’ software job experience and am thinking that I will be competitive compared to other new grads. I am aware that tech market is not doing great, but my gut tells me it is recovering: interest rates going down, crypto winter is over, no more big layoffs.

Is grad school a good move for me? Should it it avoided? I would love to hear your perspective. Thanks!