Hopefully they won't just rebrand their services, but make them work better with each other. I think it is still not possible to attach pictures from Picasa and documents from Google docs when sending mail from gmail. There are other places where Google's services don't talk to each other very well.

Google, for example, is doing a lot of things except making people click on ads.

* Intelligent search, this one day will progress into natural language understanding and even AI * Image recognition, this one day may help robots understand their surroundings * Voice recognition, again, useful * How to efficiently manage massive data centers, great for creating future infrastructure

Even clicking on ads, requires sophisticated AI techniques which are useful in many other areas

The pattern I've always seen is the opposite: job titles are exaggerated, to the point that test engineers are called "senior enterprise product developers", folks who run the tools are called "senior engineering directors", etc.

Do get your master's if you can, I am telling you that as somebody working in the industry. A master's (or a PhD) is a very distinguishing feature, while two years of experience is not. Also, two more years in school can give you (different kind of) insights and deep knowledge which two years of work can't. Having achieved a high level of education before you start a full-time job and getting family will reward you handsomely in long term.