I feel like it's hard to map the trends in industry with the types of things you can get a master's in. Like I work on cloud/kubernetes/devops stuff, and it's definitely going to be big for the next few years at least, but I don't really know how you study that stuff in school (I don't really recommend it either, it sucks). I guess an obvious one is cybersecurity. There are a lot of security masters programs I think, and the field definitely isn't going anywhere.

Data science isn't a dying field, just the term "data science" is less trendy compared to whatever other trends people are using now for "doing statistics on my computer". ML is data science, and new AI is mostly data science as well. An ML masters seems like a good idea because that's one area of computer science where a higher level degree matters more so than just general programming.

If I was getting a masters I would do something in programming language or compiler design. It doesn't have the same level of hype as security or AI, but I think it would be really interesting. Over the last decade, we've seen a bunch of new and innovative languages displace the old C/Java/Ruby status quo. Stuff like Rust and Go is pretty mainstream now, and more experimental ones like Zig, Nim, or ReasonML are getting a lot of attention. Hopefully this trend of language innovation keeps up and there's more work for language designers going forward.

What are you looking for in a masters? Why do that instead of just jumping to some new companies?