American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs • Hacker News Board

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#41

Post by stirfrykitty » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

copperx wrote: post #25

umvi wrote: post #15

PhD programming candidates at my work seem completely clueless to industry standards when it comes to coding because they've been mired in academia land for decades...

That's an example of something that can be quickly learned on the job, 1-2 days tops.

Not necessarily. While agree that "bad habits" can be broken, moving from the land of "rigorous empirical evidence" to the abstract world of slinging bits is another animal. I went from sysadmin to coder, and I had to break and unlearn many of my former ways. Much of what I do is fairly straightforward stuff, as I write tools that other people use, but I will say that being a sysadmin (still do a lot of it) and now supporting them has been very beneficial to my ability to think like the very people who use code I write.

I know very few PhDs who are also sysadmins. And fewer yet who can properly diagnose issues with workstations, servers, etc. In college campuses, the labs are maintained by sysadmins. I've worked with PhDs who were "coders", yet could not set up their own programming environments because they were done for them in academia. Not all, but most. I'm not deriding PhDs here, but as one poster said, they generally work in silo environments and don't really understand the broader pictures around them.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#42

Post by coliveira » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

freyir wrote: post #6

Throughout 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…

You're talking to the wrong people. Get out of any job that doesn't appreciate what you have. Many companies, especially the big ones, are crazy about getting PhDs to do work that requires a lot of analytical thinking, instead of simply writing the next CRUD app in javascript.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#43

Post by skj » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

HeavenFox wrote: post #26

ylmm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but what do they do? Looking at Google Brain for example, "research scientists" are exclusively people with doctorates, while "engineers" only require an MS or BS/BA. The work is totally different; they're not substitutes.

I am not sure about Google, but when I was at Facebook, any Software Engineer with PhD can opt to use title Research Scientist instead. The purpose is mostly to make Green Card application easier.

At Google, Research Scientist and Software Engineer are different job ladders.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#44

Post by stirfrykitty » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #40

stirfrykitty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no teaching job that pays for 12 months. All HS jobs for teaching pay only for the months you teach. What some schools do is to spread out the payments through the year, but the pay is the same.

That's what was meant. You can take the 9 or 12 month option. No one takes the 9 month option. I spent 5 years working for schools. I took the 12 month option. But the time off is fantastic. Nothing like the look on my wife's face when I'm not getting out of bed for three months to go slog. I miss the time off.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#45

Post by yingw787 » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #28

I worked with a bunch of a Ph.Ds at Google, and my dad had one. I myself have nothing more than a bachelor's, and no desire to get anything more. I've heard and observed that the Ph.D teaches you one crucial skill - how to take a vaguely defined research problem that nobody has done before, where you're not even sure that a solution exists, and make tangible, rigorous progress on it. Your actual doctoral topic as a P…

I agree wholeheartedly. Developing a "blue-ocean" mentality lends itself very well to profit creation and market leadership. Since everything is new, you have to be able to design and iterate on systems and processes that can mutate very quickly, with few priors available. Knowing what to do when nobody knows what to do is a highly valuable skill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#46

Post by tinyhouse » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

Well, at least in the US many PhDs have one only because it is the easiest way to immigrate to the country. The majority of CS PhDs are foreigners. It's easier than finding a job and getting a work visa. PhD is usually fully funded and tuition is waived. Unlike Masters which most international students cannot afford since financial aid is rare.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#47

Post by ska » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #28

I worked with a bunch of a Ph.Ds at Google, and my dad had one. I myself have nothing more than a bachelor's, and no desire to get anything more. I've heard and observed that the Ph.D teaches you one crucial skill - how to take a vaguely defined research problem that nobody has done before, where you're not even sure that a solution exists, and make tangible, rigorous progress on it. Your actual doctoral topic as a P…

Here is a hand-wavy characterization that is hopefully useful. A bachelors degree in X is meant to take you from nearly zero to "thinking like an X", it is the high points of sometimes centuries of thought in an area, summarized and you are handheld through the process. A masters degree will bridge the gap between the "nice" standard courses and the "messy" current research front. It's meant to get you to the point of reading current research effectively. A Ph.D. is mean to bridge you from understanding to contributing (as the focus of your work). When you've finished it, you should be expert in one or two very narrow areas, but also have the tools to make yourself expert in others.

Of course you can learn things without this structure, but having a phd is a reasonable short hand for ability in independent innovation, perhaps companies lean on it a bit much, but that is not unique to phds.

The main problem I've had bridging phd's to commercial work is hitting the right focus on skill development in areas that were deficient/missing in their course of study. A classic example, a lot of technical phds who have programmed every day for many years ... are not skilled programmers. They can become so, but have to want to learn (and not dismiss it as "trivial")

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#48

Post by randcraw » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

copperx wrote: post #25

umvi wrote: post #15

PhD programming candidates at my work seem completely clueless to industry standards when it comes to coding because they've been mired in academia land for decades...

That's an example of something that can be quickly learned on the job, 1-2 days tops.

I disagree. Production code has to deal with anomalies and failure in a graceful way that allows recovery and identification of the fault. That's not something that's taught in academia at any level, perversely.

And it takes time to learn how to use software tools effectively in a standard way in a production environment that others can understand and extend and maintain. This isn't taught in academia either, and usually it takes several years in the real world for these skills to mature and integrate into the practice of writing good pro code.

A PhD offers no advantage in this school of hard knocks.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#49

Post by ska » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

copperx wrote: post #25

umvi wrote: post #15

PhD programming candidates at my work seem completely clueless to industry standards when it comes to coding because they've been mired in academia land for decades...

That's an example of something that can be quickly learned on the job, 1-2 days tops.

If you are talking about becoming competent professional programmers, it absolutely can be learned, but "days" is laughably inaccurate.

I've often had the task of guiding phd's in making the transition. In my experience, the most motivated ones can do it in six months, but most take a year or two (or never get there).

ymmv, of course.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#50

Post by tinyhouse » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

ylmm wrote: post #18

I think it depends a lot on what it is that you want to do. For example, there are entire teams at companies like Facebook (Core Data Science) and Netflix that hire exclusively people with PhDs. Amazon especially is famous for hiring economists. Microsoft pours huge sums of money into Microsoft Research where the only goal is to fund research with relatively little (short-run) profit motive. But if you're not on one…

But there's a difference. Microsoft Research indeed hires mostly PhDs as researchers. That makes sense since they do academic research and publish papers like they are in academia. People with PhDs spent years in grad school doing exactly that.

In other places it makes less sense. And it's good not to make generalizations. If we take ML as an example, there are many excellent people without a PhD and also many PhDs that are great engineers and can write code as good as the best engineers.