MsCS in the long run

How about the value of a MsCS in five years? Say, two people with five years of work experience, pretty similar backgroung, going for the same position, one with a MsCS... will anyone care about the degree? How about in 10 years?

It depends on the employer. Some managers select the candidate that appears to be most able to work productively with the technologies that are currently in use at that particular company. Such an employer would be most interested in work experience and recent accomplishments. On the other hand, other companies may be trying to build a technical staff that looks good on paper. For example, a privately held company that is trying to impress a group of venture capitalists my want a technical staff that features a lot of engineers with graduate level degrees. The CEO of a publicly held technology company may find that institutional investors appear to be far more impressed when the CEO is able to claim that no technical challenge is too great for his scholarly technical staff. For these reasons, some corporations will insist on graduate level degree for the technical staff and management team even if the first level hiring manager is not impressed by a graduate level degree. Sadly, the educational requirements for the position may be specified by the top level management rather than by the hiring manager.
Sadly, the primary value of a master's degree is not the additional technical skills that you may or may not learn. Instead, the primary value is to look good on paper.

All opinions on this kind of things are biased. People who say PhDs are not better usually do not have PhD degrees. And you also know that there are a lot more non-PhDs than PhDs in the workspace/world. Therefore, more people think this way than those who do not.

In culture revolution of China, some real famous person even said, the more books you read, the more stupid you became.
Statistically, people hold higher degree do better, know more, have better problem solving ability in their fields. That is why the VCs pay attention to degrees. They don't want to throw their money in the water. People who are techier are on average less good to be managers. However, we have MBA's, PhDs from such as Harver business schools too. You can argue on that with special cases, give me personal experiences, famous counter examples, etc. etc. I have a lot of those too.

BTW, I pay more respect to PhDs, since I know they can do something I could not. Even I had personal experiences having beaten some PhDs on a highly techy job in the past.

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: Roseanne Zhang ]

Roseanne,
If you take a look at my posts within this discussion you will see that I have advocated getting the graduate level degrees. I'm not arguing against it. I'm only making the point that people with graduate level degrees are preferred by many corporations, but not necessarily as a result of enhanced technical skills. Instead, many corporations are primarily concerned with the paper value of the degree rather than any increased knowledge that my accompany it.
Here I will say it again: "Get the master's degree!" It does indeed have great value.
I have read many posts from those that have argued that they have not seen much correlation between graduate level degrees and enhanced productivity. My arguments are intended to make the point that a desire to achieve enhanced productivity is not the only compelling reason to pursue a graduate level degree. Instead, corporations tend to hire those with advanced degree for reasons that go beyond productivity.
Once again. Get the degree! It has great value!