I was listening to some back-episodes of the Stack Overflow podcast the other day, and they mentioned the difference between Computer Science and Software Engineering (that the latter is more about working on software in a team, how to design together, etc), and the thought occurred to me that if I wanted to get my Masters Degree, maybe that would be something worth pursuing.

I have my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. I found it to be a wholly worthwhile program, because as much as I already knew about programming, I got so much experience with different types of programming and the fundamentals behind it all — from Turing Machines in Mathematics of Computer Science to writing my own File System in Operating Systems, to writing a very basic game with OpenGL in Computer Graphics. Between all of my other programming classes, I got to play with VB, C, C++, Perl, Awk, Bash shell scripting, and Java. At work I was writing Natural/Adabas/JCL (IBM Mainframe), ColdFusion, and a touch of VB. When I graduated, I really felt like I had tried everything and I was ready to choose my career path.

I'm really glad I chose to pursue a career in ColdFusion. It's been exciting and rewarding, and a lot of fun. My wife and friends think I'm crazy for coming home from work only to want to sit down and write more CF code — but it's like an infectious disease, and one that I like. Every now and then I've thought about going back to school to get my Masters Degree, but I always write it off to the idea that a Masters in Computer Science would be a waste of time: Nobody is looking for them on resume's, and the content seems like it would be a rehash of my undergratuate work.

But the idea that Software Engineering might be something new — and a way for me to become a better developer — has me kind of intrigued. Is there something worthwhile I could get from a graduate program on Software Engineering that I haven't already gotten from eight years of working in "the industry"?