I was requested to do a 1 year masters degree as a condition on my employment. The company paid me that year to do it, and I did finish a Masters in Computer Sciences and I do not regret it. However, the following has been true for me.

• It got me a job and a nice salary bump when I started after completion, because of the conditions of my employment.
• It did not help me to get promoted later on as a manager. That takes politics. You'll be better off getting the PMP rather than a Masters, if that's what you want in life.
• It looks nice on the resume and your business card.
• It's not as relevant after several years in the industry. Oddly enough, certification gets more wight, unless you're a PhD going to Academia. It also depends where you work. For instance, if I were going to work in Puerto Rico, an EIT or PE it's more useful than a Masters, but that's because the PR job market is license crazy.
• If you do your masters mid-career does not equate a change in responsibility or salary. But, you can use it to find a new and better job being that you can create a relationship with the career center. (Sometimes, in retrospect, I should've considered that). I've known folks that the company paid for their MBA and continued performing the same job after graduation.
• You get a better sense on Academia. You learn how to work in complex projects and prepares you for research and in some cases, dissertation. That'll help you when you have to defend your design or proposal against your peers or supervisors.

I did it when I had the chance, if you're in no rush to start working, have money to pay for it and you know which area of interest you're going to pursue, go ahead and do it. Later in life it'll be harder (but not impossible).

I do not know. My company have a good way to handle these guys.

Follow the Method of Operation.

or... find another job.

Follow the code of conduct.

or... fine another job.

These issues need to be solved straight away, nobody, and I mean nobody, is good enough for this kind of behavior. The reason why he managed to fixed the code in an hour is because he was the only one that understood his crappy code. The only reason he meet the deadlines, is because he writes crappy code.

There's no need for those losers in an organization.

yeap, it is call The Sopranos school of envelope management :)

I use GUI calculator (gcalc ilk)... but I also use an abacus and a slide ruler. Just for the challenge...

In your case, you might be stuck the VZ. I swapped from Verizon to Cablevision after dealing with some guy in Taiwan in a lousy VOIP line after spending 2 hours with a guy in India asking me to turn on or off my DSL modem. The problem was already documented from their tech that my line was too far from the central office and the DSL link was unreliable. It was clearly an SS7 problem, but those drones did not want to hear about it.

The day I disconnected from them there was a meek satisfaction hearing the sales rep. begging for me to stay.

Although I understand the intention of the newscast to help this young lady, I feel that the overall reporting was overall biased. It's not the first time I've seen this kind of "behavior" on the local or smaller news outlets. One time while reading El Nuevo Dia, they were looking for "Linux" to refute a story they wrote. I guess that the silver lining is that at least its some publicity...

I almost got mugged in Newark, near the train station, I managed to outsmart the guy by getting into the bus while the doors were closing (hey, they do the same to snag a chain before the subway closes door). I do not think that it will not work, and how people are extremely PO'ed with Corzine and all the spending all over the state, I think that this is helping who knows who's pocket rather than fighting crime. The city of Cayey, Puerto Rico put a lot of cameras all over town. Two weeks ago the FBI nabbed 70 people living in public housing that were selling drugs for the past 16 years. Did it help? No, people in Cayey do not feel any safer, and complain downtown has become a shooting gallery. I doubt that will help...