It is going to depend on your geographic location and specific company. But I would say in general, you should consider a Masters in Analytics (or similar) for your longer term job market competitiveness.
Right now almost every programmer wants to be a Data Scientist. So, whenever a data science job is posted, they receive hundreds or thousands of resumes. How can they manage that? They eliminate anyone without ALL the requirements. If it says Master degree is required, they usually mean it.
Follow up to my earlier post. I know the manager of a team who is currently hiring for a Data Scientist position. I asked him specifically if the Masters degree was a hard requirement, he replied that "the masters is a hard requirement per upper management".
So I don't think "Kaggle Master" is going to substitute for a University Master's degree, in this case.
Yeah I mean I think it also depends a lot on the company. If OP mostly wants to work at big companies, having a MS is useful because corporations love credentials (not a knock against them, its generally just the truth).
Startups / medium sized companies in general are okay with lots of projects, experience, etc. They love self starters. Even if an MS is required, if you have some cool iPython notebooks / blog posts on explaining / implementing grad-student-level algorithms and concepts then often that's enough :)
Oh cmon, we are all data literate here, I wouldn't generalize about all upper management everywhere. These are probably just more traditional mega corps where credentials are important because it's a filter for them. But regardless, there's tons of companies that have dropped the graduate degree requirement, instead making it preferred, or just an 'or'
Interesting, thanks for that link. Do you reckon an online program such as this would still be considered competitive in the job market as opposed to a more traditional Msc in CS (With a focus on algorithms,machine learning, ai,data mining and distributed systems)?
