American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
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American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
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Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#2I heard somewhere that stress resilience is at least one skill well-nurtured while in pursuit of terminal degrees. This can be argued in itself.
However, if correlation is significant - does it become the next valuable "signal" for employers?
Else, Is this a signal merely because "everyone" is trying to pursue grad school to stay competitive with bachelor, and a new benchmark is needed?
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#3Very few jobs require PhDs. Tech most certainly doesn't. I've been in this industry across three decades now, and by far the most talented people I've worked for or with have had nothing but HS diplomas and AS degrees. That's right. The bottom rung education levels.
My dearest mentor, a man who has forgotten more about *nix, coding, and about anything else than I will ever know has a HS diploma and can and does run rings around everyone else. He has a mind like a steel trap. All of the great coders I have known had, at best, a BS or BA, none of them in an actual IT discipline.
Anyone can learn to code, be a great sysadmin, or a network guru. All it takes is want power. If you want it bad enough, you will get there. In fact, I'll hire a person who has changed careers into IT who is smart and hungry over a simpering PhD candidate who thinks they are the cat's pajamas. There are some calls for PhDs, but not many. It's a badge of some sort for companies to show they have "smart" people. PhDs are great at research, not so much at actual doing things. This has been my experience with working with more than a few.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#4This sounds insane to me. I will never hire another PhD if I can possibly avoid it.
I would estimate that I have worked with around 30 PhD-holders in my career. Consistent issues: no ability to hit deadlines, no sense of the big picture, easily distracted by irrelevant details.
This kinda says it all.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#5Very few jobs require PhDs. Tech most certainly doesn't. I've been in this industry across three decades now, and by far the most talented people I've worked for or with have had nothing but HS diplomas and AS degrees. That's right. The bottom rung education levels. My dearest mentor, a man who has forgotten more about *nix, coding, and about anything else than I will ever know has a HS diploma and can and does run r…
I have a PhD and completely agree with you. I did a PhD because back then working in software wasn't attractive to me (open source was not normal and Linux was seen as this weird geek think). But it set my career back a good few years really.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#6Throughout most of my career, my PhD has felt like a liability. Especially when I've sought out a non-research-oriented position. Employers seem skeptical that I might rather spend my day coding a product I believe in, rather than solving esoteric research problems.
In the case of many PhD degrees, you devote yourself to studying a niche topic in great depth for several years. In the end, employers might see that you wrote a paper like "Electron vortex beams with high quanta of orbital angular momentum" (picking some academic paper at random), and have a tough time connecting that to their day-to-day needs. So I understand why employers have been cautious.
Not to mention, a non-negligible number of PhDs are incompetent at doing anything hands-on. And even when it comes to research, many are experts at coming up with overcomplicated solutions to non-existent problems.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#7Work as a data scientist in AI. Have seen absolutely no evidence (either from my own personal observations, or from others) that PhD/masters are quantitatively or qualitatively better than folks without, outside of very specific scenarios (materials sciences, or very deep specific applied statistics - and even then, stats BS majors can generally knock balls out of the park).
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#8I work in a semiconductor company and we have process engineers as PhDs. Development of a semiconductor process has little deep technical work and more about managing suppliers, process characterization and lots of statistics.
But we have folks with deep technical know how and PHD in some esoteric subject of proton-proton collision inside a nuclear reactor core developing ball attach processes on BGA chip packages or working on chip shooters. It makes no sense.
Also, these PhDs are terribly unhappy and usually on H1-B visa locked in and unable to change jobs.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#9Very few jobs require PhDs. Tech most certainly doesn't. I've been in this industry across three decades now, and by far the most talented people I've worked for or with have had nothing but HS diplomas and AS degrees. That's right. The bottom rung education levels. My dearest mentor, a man who has forgotten more about *nix, coding, and about anything else than I will ever know has a HS diploma and can and does run r…
I have a PhD and completely agree with you. I did a PhD because back then working in software wasn't attractive to me (open source was not normal and Linux was seen as this weird geek think). But it set my career back a good few years really.
And if you ever get to a point where you are financially secure yet want a non-stressful job, you could always teach something like Yearbook at a HS. I know a guy who did this. He cashed out of his IT job after making almost a million. He wife is a nurse. He got tired of the burnout, on-call rotation, and got his teaching certificate, got hired at a high school teaching Yearbook creation and media. He's off 3 months of the year, gets paid for 12, and is living the easy life. He works from 0730-1530 daily, no nights, no weekends, no tests to grade, no stupid standardization tests, nothing. Literally easy street.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#10Very few jobs require PhDs. Tech most certainly doesn't. I've been in this industry across three decades now, and by far the most talented people I've worked for or with have had nothing but HS diplomas and AS degrees. That's right. The bottom rung education levels. My dearest mentor, a man who has forgotten more about *nix, coding, and about anything else than I will ever know has a HS diploma and can and does run r…
That's fine most of the time but Google etc. are going to want a few PhD's in graph theory, AI, number theory, etc