Ask HN: Does a master's in CS develop you into a better programmer?

A masters is not geared towards making you a good programmer. There may certainly be a significant amount of programming involved in completing projects and homework, but they don't translate into being an effective programmer at the workplace. If, like me, you spend all of your masters doing research, you could potentially be programming a lot but the requirements are not the same as the industry, and the skills don't directly map to being good at programming in the workplace. Doing research is geared towards providing you with a framework to ask the right questions and search in a structured manner for possible solutions. It also isn't true that the most talented programmers choose to do a Masters. I've seen programmers of all abilities in these programs.

Some data says no: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...

Getting a masters in CS is a good way to get a visa to the US though. Most MS CS programs are about ~20% US citizens.

Disclaimer: I am a programmer, not a computer scientist.

Computer science is a misnomer because it is a field within mathematics. It's about the abstract, theory of computability rather than actually computing with programs. I think this confusion arises from school curricula blending the two together because both are about "computers". It's really orthogonal to programming and has no bearing on one's effectiveness as a programmer.

No. It's not even that second thing.