I found one solution. At least it works for WSJ. Firefox has a “reading mode” button next to the url. That seems to bypass the paywall

I tried that, and it got some error about “secure connection”

I am a lead/staff SWE at my company, and I have never looked at education level when hiring. I studied robotics in college and almost nothing I learned there applies to what I am doing now (distributed data processing and ML).

Don’t get a master’s degree unless there is a specific skill you want (ML, databases, networks, etc). You should be learning at work. If you are not learning at work, move on to another company.

Probably the most valuable thing you could get to give you better chances at faang or elsewhere, is a friend on the inside. A single removed will get you past all of the automated filtering that happens.

Graphql federation could help unify these services behind a single API.