My coworker is an older guy with a PhD. He's really smart (also a bit aloof). We do the same job (typical backend software engineering)
American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
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Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#52In my experience there are two good reasons for hiring PhDs in some tech contexts.
1) you need specific, state of the art knowledge, and this person was actively publishing in that precise area with significant impact.
2) you need good general problem solvers with some technical depth in an area.
If you hire #1, you should build a program around them to capture the knowledge. This is probably the most efficient way to absorb this as institutional knowledge. The ratio of these people to other engineering roles should be 1:fairly big number.
If you hire #2, you should already understand that you are not hiring general tech employees, and define roles accordingly. If they are new to industry they will probably have significant skill deficits (as well as significant skills) and you need a plan to deal with it. They probably are strongly motivated by spending quite a bit of their time on innovation. Plausible exceptions for people whose academic work was long ago.
If you're hiring because you think "smart programmer" you're probably doing it wrong, and will probably both regret it, in my experience.
There is a third model which is essentially building a internal academic environment, but that is expensive and long term enough not to apply to most situations.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#53Well, 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.
It's also much easier to get visa sponsorship for a foreign worker who has a PhD than one who does not. Someone with a PhD has a stronger chance of being eligible for an O-1, whereas someone without likely has to go through the H1-B lottery
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#54It might be worth looking at the breakup for this job requirement as immigrant vs non-immigrant workers. Many job ads that mention "Phd" as requirement might be simply to complete the PERM process of already hired employee and not a real criteria.
Secondly, in many cases bright kids from India/China/Korea come to USA to only do a Phd and end up on these jobs giving wrong signals that Phds are important.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#55This is the logical consequence of the watering down of undergraduate degrees over the past several decades. Employers use education as a way of screening hires for intelligence, diligence, and other factors. Since undergraduate education has become something everyone "has" to do, the graduated-from-undergraduate flag provides minimal signal. The PhD still does, for now.
This signaling game is really wasteful though. As others rightly point out, people getting these degrees aren't really using PhD skills on the job. They're wasting some of their most productive years in a zero-sum status game.
More and more lately, I've come to believe that tech companies should just decline to play this silly game. Hire promising people right out of high school and tech support them the necessary skills --- bring back the E1 level. Issue your own aptitude tests if you want. You'll be at a competitive advantage relative to the people who demand that candidates do well on the credential treadmill.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#56Work 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).
Unfortunately, hiring for data science is now pretty much exclusive to having a Masters/PhD beforehand as a filter. (it wasn't as bad a year ago, but data science now is at a point where candidate supply is outstripping demand)
Yes: we now have a glut at the low end, and tech is going the way of law. That's what happens when you spend years arguing that we should turn every molecule of biomass on the planet into a tech company employee.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 usu…
You said this better than I did below. You are right. I emerged from college an eager guy who went straight into a production environment. First gig?
"Oh, we see you have Perl, awk, sed, Bash on your CV.. We need you to write some code to get this and that data from the server logs and then spit it out in this and that format, but we don't want this particular info."
I about crapped myself the first day on the job. Fortunately, my team lead knew what he had asked for and coached me through how to be a useful nix admin. This led me to being more interested in coding than setting up nix boxes and getting them to talk to databases. I fell in love with regex stuff and still love it. Perl and Python are still my go-tos with regards to this. I still write small (25-30 line) programs in awk. Sadly, I have a job now where they all love PowerShell, so I've been "forced" to use it for certain Windows tooling tasks. Learning Go on my own now. I find R and F# fascinating and might take this on in time.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#58I 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…
I used to work in the semiconductor industry, and I left to get a PhD. Unlikely I'd go back. The PhDs we had were a statistician and a materials characterization engineer. The former was ignored and then fired because he kept telling people that their statistical procedures didn't work, and the latter spent a ton of time doing TEM sample prep.
Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#59Throughout 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.
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Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
#60I 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 t…
Ah, I think you've misunderstood entirely.
I meant the teams in those companies as opposed to the companies more broadly (e.g., Core Data Science at Facebook, not Facebook in general). I mention those companies together because they're well-known for investing a lot in research (e.g., by hiring PhDs). And in these cases, they're hiring PhDs for reasons that are totally different from the reasons for which they hire engineers (who may also have doctorates). For example, there is indeed a difference between the institution-level goals of Facebook and Microsoft Research, but that difference is less substantial between researchers at Core Data Science at Facebook and researchers on the Computational Social Science team at Microsoft Research.
I'm making the point that there is a difference in the value of a PhD depending on where in the company you work. For the research-oriented teams, the value of a PhD lies in the fact that you've ostensibly been trained to contribute to what we know, rather than just applying it.
Going along with your ML example, the difference would be like comparing Athey, Tibshirani, and Wager's work on generalizing random forests against building a random forest using scikit-learn. I'm not saying that someone without a PhD can't write the paper that they did, but it's for sure not at all just a matter of who's better at writing code.