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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

#81

Post by HenryKissinger »

coliveira wrote: post #42
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.

The point of the article is that companies, especially the big ones, shouldn't be so eager to hire people with PhDs.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#82

Post by georgeburdell »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #3

Very 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…

Do you have a PhD? Your post reeks of statistical sample bias. You don’t work for/with unqualified HS and AS holders precisely because they don't have an esteemed degree that allows hiring managers to give them the benefit of the doubt

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#83

Post by HenryKissinger »

sevensor wrote: post #58
spectramax wrote: post #8

I 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.

> The former was ignored and then fired because he kept telling people that their statistical procedures didn't work

Why did they hire him then?

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#84

Post by watwut »

x0x0 wrote: post #67
JamesBarney wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this before because I've found the same thing. I think it's caused by an over reliance on education as a signal. If you have a stack of resumes you're likely to interview everyone with a PhD, but only the ones with the most stellar github profile if they have no formal education. During the interview if the PhD says something silly you'll probably disregard it. But the person without a formal educa…

I'm a hiring manager who interviews a lot. In my experience, high performance in difficult degrees at good schools are a very strong indicator of future success. We find gems outside the above profile, but it holds true even across the people we've hired from code schools.

Isn't it that high performance in something difficult predict future success? That is my theory ar least, that phd requires people to do something difficult and at times demotivating in long time span which means that successfull phd are going to be not just be like that initially, but also have an experience with it.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#85

Post by HenryKissinger »

kozikow wrote: post #71

In some companies, e.g. quantitative hedge funds, PhDs are a selling point by the company. If you have two equal hedge funds to invest in, you would probably put your money into one with more prestigious university Ph.D. quants. Edit: Or startup pitching, M&A or even some sales - basically our deck team slide is "X PhDs, Y ex-Googlers".

If I have two equal hedge funds to invest in, I'll probably put my money into the one with the most consistent average annualized returns over the last 10-15 years.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#86

Post by fogetti »

ska wrote: post #52

In 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 t…

> They probably are strongly motivated by spending quite a bit of their time on innovation

I would rephrase it as spending time on research. Which might or might not be innovative.

I know for a fact that there is a plethora of applied ML papers where people simply toy around with the sample set and publish their results. There is nothing innovative about it. Although it requires some knowledge in feature analysis and some other in related algorithms and in basic statistics but that's nothing that cannot be picked up by taking a few months of courses in applied machine learning.

So really, in fact the only case where that extra knowledge is justified is your case #1. And even then I am not convinced that these PhDs actually have ever done anything innovative. There is just too much of a chance that they simply iterated on existing research ideas in their field and they can only continue to do so. Which is again not very innovative I think.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#87

Post by drjesusphd »

everdrive wrote: post #63
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…

> Interestingly, depression and anxiety might actually be a feature of developing this skillset, not a bug - these two mental disorders are endemic among these fields as well. Given how insightful your comment was, I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Why, outside of comorbidity, do you think depression and anxiety might be related to developing this skillset?

If I may take a stab at it... I think it might have something to do with the disparate scales of thought vs emotion compared to what humans have evolved to deal with.

Today, when you're tasked with creating something new, and your identity is invested in such a mission, it's a much more gargantuan task than being indispensable to your local tribe. Competing at a global level is just not something we're generally wired to do. I would be curious if world-class athletes, movie stars, business executives, politicians, etc. also have similar emotional problems.

But our emotions do not work on such a scale. They're meant to deal with the anxieties of what a few hundred people in your community think and how to secure your next meal.

In creative lines of work (however one chooses to define it), one is trying to be the superlative best or first to achieve something valuable on the scale of billions of people. And you probably hope that such a creation outlives you. We have not been designed for such tasks at an emotional level.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#88

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

In my humble experience, people with PhD, especially those who spent a lot of time in academia, tend to be very result oriented. I'd say too result oriented.

As an example, I ask a guy to implement me a LinkedList during the interview. The result usually works, but designwise... Oh, my god...

And that makes a perfect sense: once an article is published you usually don't need to maintain your code for another decade.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#89

Post by CoolGuySteve »

diffserv wrote: post #69
optimuspaul wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm not convinced, or I should say my experience does not support this. I think it is more likely that those that already have that skill are the ones that pursue the Ph.D path.

I completely agree with your observation. It's not that the Ph.D. prepares you for it, but that most people that pursue Ph.D. have that attribute. I don't think all Ph.D. students or any ordinary engineer can take a vaguely defined research problem and make it succeed. Ph.D. doesn't necessarily prepare you for the research part; it does, however, prepare you to advertise a very /bad solution/ as a novel contribution.…

I find there are 2 kinds of PhD holders in engineering, those who are diligent and capable and were able to follow through on a difficult problem for years; and those whose problem solving abilities are so impractical that they stayed in school for as long as possible.

The first is worth their weight in gold, the second is fairly easy to detect after a few git check-ins.

Actually I lied, there's a third kind, brilliant people that get bored with their job and write super-complicated frameworks to satiate that boredom. That's not restricted to PhDs but I see it more often with them.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#90

Post by nostrademons »

everdrive wrote: post #63
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…

> Interestingly, depression and anxiety might actually be a feature of developing this skillset, not a bug - these two mental disorders are endemic among these fields as well. Given how insightful your comment was, I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Why, outside of comorbidity, do you think depression and anxiety might be related to developing this skillset?

This aside is more speculative and significantly based on personal experience doing 2 green-field products for one employer, founding 3 startups, and doing some internal research projects at Google...

But what I've noticed is that aside from frequently co-occurring with creative work, depression and anxiety are frequently the trigger to finding a non-obvious solution and making forward progress. In other words, they're not just mental disorders; they're feelings that can give you useful signal about how to proceed next, if you listen very carefully to them. Anxiety is basically your emotional systems being hyper-engaged, such that you get an emotional response from nearly everything. Depression feels like the opposite, a deadening of your emotional senses, but oftentimes escaping the depression actually points the way to escaping your real-world problem. If you can imagine a future where you are not depressed (which if you've suffered clinical depression is actually quite difficult), very likely that's a strong signal that that's what you should actually be doing, no matter how weird or unreasonable it sounds.

There's some evidence for this hypothesis here (2009):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressions-evolu...

You could also think of the anxiety related to creative work in relation to System 1 of the brain in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. In highly ambiguous circumstances (which basically all creative work is), it makes sense for your brain to become hypersensitive to all available stimuli, and to quickly pattern-match on a course of action without too much rational consideration. We experience that sort of emotional overload as anxiety.

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