The enormous majority of Master’s degrees awarded in most fields are for taught Master’s that bear far more resemblance to undergraduate study than Ph.D. preparation. Unless you know someone has a degree that is only possible to get if you were admitted to a Ph.D. programme the assumption should be that it’s a cat cow. There are exceptions, like GA Tech’s OMSCS, but unless you have excellent reason to believe otherwise an MA or MS can be assumed to be a university’s cash grab.
> The enormous majority of Master’s degrees awarded in most fields are for taught Master’s that bear far more resemblance to undergraduate study than Ph.D. preparation.
That's a very US-centric assumption that's wrong for Europe, Russia, the better universities in China, India etc. Some masters are 100% research, some 100% taught, some are a mix, some are highly specialized, some are all-round, some are interdisciplinary, some have internships. You're aware of that, right? Not all countries' university systems balance their books by farming foreign MS students in short 100% taught courses. Some of them actually do legit research.
You bring us to a related point: most US recruiters and sourcers, and many programmers, don't know how to evaluate credentials of applicants or institutions from the rest of world, especially the parts that don't speak English as first language. If the applicant is from (say) a 2nd/3rd-tier part of China and did their MS(/BS) there, and unless their parents were rich, raw English fluency is not a very good proxy for subject-matter knowledge, only for their parents' wealth level. I've worked with some brilliant people who didn't come across sounding that competent in interviews, but were great programmers. Many candidates don't sit the GRE/GSAT. (Beware of builtin cultural assumptions and biases in assessing applicants. It took me years to figure out which ones.)
