Ask HN: Should I do a CS masters at Cambridge or start as a new grad at Amazon?

I’d go with Cambridge for the experience alone. Letting this AI stuff shake out some more is also a bonus. Amazon could leave you laid off in 6 months. Once you get the masters, you have that for life, and a lot more options.

There will be corporations waiting to employ people the rest of your life. Going back to school later if you change your mind is a lot harder once you’ve started to build a life. Solidify that foundation now while it’s easy and you’re still in school mode.

Cambridge for sure. One aspect to consider is the funding. Would you have to get into years of debt to pay off the Masters? If no, then it is a no brainer.

Context: Been at Google for 10 years. I have a master's in CS/ML myself. Wouldn't trade it for working in FAANG a couple of years earlier.

Cambridge. Train the human, not the machine.

Amazon will still be there, if that’s what you decide for your soul afterward. If you made the cut now, you’ll make the cut again in future.

The world is so much bigger than commerce. Even if you choose to work the world of commerce, you’ll have a richer experience of it, and bring more subtle value to your professional career, entering into it with eyes that can see other hues in the outside world.

Plus relationships with a cohort of smart thoughtful humans who are engaging with the world from other perspectives, as you all go into the decades ahead.

I’d do whatever is not working at Amazon. At Cambridge you will build yourself as a person and probably make life long friends. By the time you’re done the industry may well be over the AI hype and the job market might make more sense.

In this case you will be well reared to take advantage of it.

> EDIT: It's very funny, I've asked the same thing on Reddit and over there 14 out of 15 comments advised me to take the job offer and here on HN the first 3 out of 3 comments tell me to do the masters

Which subreddit did you post on? Try one that's similar Hacker News like maybe programming and I think you'd get similar adobe as HN.

I'd chose Cambridge every time. But that's because I think I'd enjoy the time on the campus much more than in the corporate hell of Amazon. YMMV.

If your situation will allow you to, do the masters. A job at Amazon will always be there for you, but once you get a taste of industry it's hard to go back into academia. Looking back, I wish I'd done more schooling and taken more advantages of the opportunity available to me back then.

Flexibility and money are your long term goals, and the masters opens more doors to that than getting into industry today. What subfield would you be getting your masters in?

I work at an AWS consulting firm and have worked with several employees in the AWS product and professional services team. Overall the general culture I've seen is for employees to get ahead by throwing others under the bus. I know I'm generalizing to all of AWS, but the work culture isn't the best in my opinion to be absorbed in.

If the CS master is free(!), then go for it.

If you have to pay -lets say- 30.000 bucks, rethink.

The additional time of being student will open you newer doors, than if you are already working - assumption: IF the CS master is free, otherwise it may not pay off

Being a student is a huge privilege in most countries accordings to different costs/fees/taxes - so I recommend everyone to keep this status, as long AS IT IS FREE and legally possible.

Cambridge- for a few reasons: (A) Amazon would likely offer you another position if you still wanted to work there. (B) It’ll probably never be easier for you to go to, and do well, in school than at your current age / position. (C) You’ll meet a wide variety of people that’ll broaden your horizons.

My general advice to students is to avoid big companies as your first job. You will be a tiny cog in a huge machinery and will drown in cooperate politics you don't yet understand.

If I was in your position I would try to combine masters with working at a startup or a small company.

Reddit is full of desperate crabs pulling you down into the bucket. Go to Cambridge, that's literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Working at Amazon blows, especially as the bottom of the totem pole. If you can afford more college, go do that. You'll probably meet much more interesting people that way.

So in terms of flexibility, Cambridge. Tons of companies will preferentially snatch up candidates with prestigious advanced degrees, and many of them will even pay you more. Heck, no one will care if you drop out of your advanced education halfway through. It's easier to go academia -> corporate than the reverse, unless you make a ton of money.

So in terms of long-term money, the question is the oldest one in economics: when is the next market crash? There's two conflicting narratives right now. One is that new AI technologies are going to take a handful of companies to the moon. The other is that these companies are engaged in an incestuous network of investments and the whole thing is about to come crashing down.

If the former is true, or even just a normal economy, the fastest way to make money long-term is to make a lot short-term while living like a monk and investing.

If the latter is true, all the stock you purchase/are granted in the next couple years will lose a big chunk of its value, and you will spend years just getting back to even, so you might as well wait a couple of years and jump in after the next crash.

Go to Cambridge. If you already have an Amazon offer at your skill level, with extra education it's going to be easy to have something similar or even better. Besides, those types of opportunities come rarely in one's life you have to have the correct amount of free time and the ability to take them. Working for a corporation can wait.

If the goal is simply money, take the job now and play the corporate game. There’s a lot of money to be made being cut throat.

If you have a genuine love for computer science and the craft of programming then steer clear from the corporate world. It will suck the life out of you.

flip a coin, the option you want while the coin is in the air is what you should do.

It becomes much harder to go back to school after a while. Responsibilities pile up, you fall out of eligibility for funding.

I loved doing a masters as a mature student, but I was very lucky to be able to do so.

School won't always be so easy. Do school.

Also, Amazon are gross.

It depends on what you want to do with your life and career. You haven't said what your interests are or what your Master's is going to be in. If you want to be a software engineer then starting career early is better. If you want to go into research then going to university is better. If your Masters is going to be in liberal arts then your prospects of a lucrative job out of Cambridge will be less than having gained two years of professional experience. Since I don't know the specifics, I'll give general advise - decide what's important to you long term and choose the option that aligns with it.

Cambridge.

You'll have no problem getting the Amazon job (or similar) with a masters degree from Cambridge afterwards.

I doubt you'll retire wishing you'd worked just one more year at Amazon.

(I have a masters from Imperial. An equally good alternative if you'd prefer to live in London, or prefer somewhere a little more business focused. Google and Amazon both skipped the first interview stage based on my degree.)

Also if you ask Amazon, they're very likely to keep the job offer open for a year.

Cambridge. The experience will be more enjoyable, the networking will be good, and seeing a Masters from Cambridge on a resume would make a bigger impression (to me) than seeing that you worked for Amazon.

Aligning with your goals, take Amazon.

Over the long term (assuming the next 10-15 years) getting more experience with building, communicating, and operating systems that solve business problems will get you more cash.

In theory, that masters may boost your starting comp but in the longer term, your comp would likely end up similar. I've worked on numerous teams with a mix of all academic levels and it has never been a huge predictor of comp.

Take this with a grain of salt, it's all anecdotal :).

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Congrats on 2 wonderful options!

I grew up in an environment that valued education over all else, so I pursued post-grad stuff starting 1997 or so and stuck to my guns until way after dot com crashed. Turns out I hated it and ended up wasting a bunch of time and missing out on the exciting stuff, so the advice I would give to my then-self is obviously to not do that. But would I give the same advice to myself if conditions were like today? Thinking maybe not, unless the Amazon thing was thick in the AI infra tech.

Probably masters. Few reasons:

- it's easier to keep going than to come back from a job. - our industry is changing, heavily, and I have no idea what shape it'll be in in four years time. - I think that AI is making much of the experience of an entry level redundant. What you get from your masters might make more of a difference.

I've not worked at Amazon, but work in other big tech. If you were my son, I'd tell you to pursue Cambridge. Amazon employment isn't that special.

(i've been in industry for 18+ years, went to a name brand school, and live in the heart of silicon valley. Cambridge, i'd imagine, gives you at the least a more interesting story, and at the most a different opportunity set. amazon is now the lower bar of what you should hope to attain after Cambridge.)

if you're used to the money, it's much harder to go back to studying. Also if you get to have a family you are unlikely to start studying again.

studying typically requires you to think broader, while companies usually want you to take a very specific role.

Take the job. Save a lot of money.

Nothing more freeing than being young with good savings. Puts life on easy mode.

I'd choose Cambridge, as I am sure that it provides the opportunity to meet a lot of influential people that you might be glad to have in your contacts later on in life, as well as a masters from there will open a lot of doors alone.

No one knows what is going to happen in the long term. No one is going to know what is going to happen in the short term. I'd take the education and put off working as long as possible and see if the market sorts itself out.

Avoid Amazon

Cambridge MS will open doors that will never open for you otherwise. Amazon will be there in 2 years, you won’t have control over your destiny, and things can go much more wrong there with toxic people and no recourse.

Either way, I suggested you try to build and launch 1 product per month. For example, someone launched a SAAS for excel formulas that now makes +$2M.

TAKE THE JOB OFFER.

You can always get your Masters if you get laid off. Jobs are precious especially for new grads. Do not make the mistake of passing over this job offer, it’s worth so much more than a masters degree. You can always get your master’s later on, for example if you get laid off from Amazon and can’t find another job.

Note that Amazon has some cultural misfeatures that require unlearning at other employers.

I've hired ex-Amazon engineers at Google who believe that your job is to fuck over as many other teams as possible in the name of delivering your feature as quickly as possible so you can climb the ladder, and who believe your manager's job is to back you up while you fuck over those other teams and steal credit from other engineers on them. They tend to struggle in Google's more collaborative culture, and I'd imagine they'd also struggle in other companies that are a little less sociopathic. The problem is particularly acute with people who have never worked anywhere but Amazon; older employees coming out of Amazon are more like "Well, that's just how Amazon is, I'll adapt myself to whatever culture my current job has", but junior engineers are often shaped and molded by it because they've never known anything else.

I'm often a big fan of going to industry early because a.) you make more money early which can then compound and b.) you actually do learn a lot of tacit knowledge working in industry, very often more relevant than what you'd learn as a student. But if the choice is between Amazon and Cambridge I would probably do Cambridge.

Depends on your history, what team you're on at Amazon and what you are planning to study at Cambridge. In general, I would choose Cambridge, but if your undergrad was at a Tier1 university and you are working on a truly cutting edge team at Amazon, then you can consider Amazon.

Do what you want to do

Do the masters. None of us know what the hell is going to happen with coding as a job right now, but a graduate degree carries weight well outside its narrow area. If coding goes to complete shit and you're in or done school, you'll be in a great position in two years to pivot into something else for a PhD. If you're just working, well you're just another layoff.

100% amazon. real world experience is worth 10x more than degrees.