It&#x27;s an impediment because, when you&#x27;re applying for jobs, you&#x27;re older, poorer, and have no extra job experience.<p>There are absolutely jobs where it would help, like research. If you wanted to work on the super-technical stuff at Google or Facebook, like developing new languages, you&#x27;d probably need that MS.<p>But generally speaking, employers care exclusively about your experience (partially because there are so many self-taught people that do good work), and a Masters just says, &quot;I&#x27;m going to demand a higher salary&quot;.<p>On a semi-related note, I&#x27;m self-taught, like you are, and I considered a Masters. I now laugh at that idea -- I don&#x27;t know even a tiny fraction of what&#x27;s needed to get a Masters. It was very humbling to talk to people with CS degrees and hear all the things they learned.<p>When you miss out on an undergraduate CS degree, you miss a <i>lot</i> of theory and math. Jumping right into an MS program would be incredibly difficult unless you&#x27;re a prodigy of math and logic (and have the time to spend on catching up).<p>(None of that is to say that your typical web development job requires a CS degree at all. We use high-level languages and, oftentimes, widely-used, lightly-customized software.)