I'm speaking from my past experience as a hiring manager at a start up with outlier standards for performance and trajectory in software engineering and machine learning. I estimate I've screened tens of thousands of resumes and interviewed at least a thousand people in my career.

First and most important: your internships and work experience, and what you accomplished during those jobs. They should tell a story of increasing and accelerating personal growth, learning, challenge and passion. If you can share personal or class projects, even better.

After your experiences, your degrees will be considered based on the number of years each typically requires, with early graduation and multiple majors being notable.

1. PhD, if you have one. A STEM PhD was particularly helpful for ML/Data
science positions, but not required.

2. BS/BA (3-4 year degree)

3. MS/MEng (1-2 year degree)

Put another way, if you don't have a PhD, the MS/MEng program is a tiebreaker compared to your experience and undergrad credentials.

International students get a raw deal. The online masters will barely help you get a job or launch a career in the US. US universities appear to offer the chance to work for major US companies with a notable university (such as Georgia Tech) on your resume, only to feed their graduates into our broken immigration and work authorization system, H1-B indentured servitude and no replies from the countless companies that have an unspoken higher bar for those needing sponsorship.

To round out a few other contexts HN readers might experience:

If you are an international considering an on-campus MS/MEng, US universities are charging full price while giving you a credential of limited value and utility. Apply the same comments above but at a much higher price than GA Tech’s OMSCS.

If you are completing/just completed a less notable undergrad degree, paying for a masters program at an elite CS school (like GA Tech) is usually a bad deal. If it not a requirement for the positions you seek, it won't help your career chances much.

If you have an undergrad degree and your employer will pay/cover your MS/MEng at night/personal time (and that is your passion), awesome and go for it! It will be a lot of work and lost sleep to get everything out of the experience, but a lifelong investment in your growth and experience.

If you are completing/just completed a notable undergrad degree (tier-1, internationally recognized program), you don't need the masters. Feel free to get one for your learning, sense of self and building research connections while you ponder getting a PhD. The hiring and salary benefit will be very small--you are already the candidate every company wants to meet. If you decide to get a PhD, that will open some new doors but take 5+ years to get there.

At my previous company, we made it our forte and team passion to get authorization for employees--given a global pool of candidates and a hiring bar to match. I'm really proud of our effort here given the broken and unfair system. Sadly, many companies do not share this value or cannot justify the time, effort and expense, or cannot scale such a program to a larger number of employees across a less selective bar.