Someone got hired on a data science team I worked on with no master's degree, partially due to scraping some of our company's data from our website and showing some cool data science-like stuff using that scraped data to the people interviewing/hiring. That said, this may have been a successful tactic there too because the team would sometimes hire non-master's/PhD holders if a person showed aptitude and 'passion' for this type of work. We had PhDs who were really not equipped to do well at the business level, and those with Bachelor's that made major contributions (and vice-versa). Unfortunately there are still companies and teams out there that think a higher degree is a good filter...