Yes, that kind of thing happens a lot. It's the "blame game". I've been caught in it more than once. The first time was dealing with a manager that was very politically conservative and really clashed with software engineering types.

The times I've been fired to been put into very bad professional situation were with folks that were either completely nuts managing me or were very judgmental and too narrow minded.

For the sane case, they fail to understand that other folks with very good technical backgrounds can do things completely different than they do can also get important work done. There's a loss of mutual respect there out of their own ignorance.

I left a job because of these circumstances where I was blamed for failing to get stuff done in a manner that an enemy faction would have liked. I eventually showed it to them that I didn't fit that negative image of me that they had, but by then I happily had submitted my notice and moved onto an all our better job, higher paying, more interesting work. :)

Depends on the situation. If you can get a good coding job in a good situation where you can learn a lot, then the master's degree isn't worth it.

I'd continue with education if I couldn't find a decent gig. There's something to be said about doing and open source project as well to get experiences that you can't get in either college or a job situation.

These days, if you have the raw skill, say for kernel development, going through a master's degree program at a University of California minimally would be a waste of time even for Berkeley or something like that.

You can even cut that off sooner than that in that a wide variety of folks drop out of college to do the same thing and just do not suffer from not having either degrees.

It's situation sensitive however.