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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

#101

Post by robertAngst »

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…

>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.

Interesting, that was not the impression I had from 2 engineering professors at my local uni.

It sounded like I was going to be their assistant in studying their idea for up to 6 years.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#102

Post by analognoise »

house9-2 wrote: post #99
analognoise wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high school or AS degree only would get thrown in the trash directly everywhere I've ever worked for even the most basic technical jobs. 50 years ago big companies would take you with just a HS degree, and if you were smart and showed initiative, put you under the wing of an engineer - or pay to send you to school. This does not happen anymore. You're also SEVERELY limiting your career if all you complete is high s…

I have a High School education then went to community college in my mid 20's and got certified in Perl and HTML - LOL I've been getting paid to build web apps since 2000, got in right when the first dot-com bust went down; I have never been out of work since entering this field. I also tend to work for smaller companies.

You can survive jumping out of a plane without a parachute too, but there's a reason it isn't a recommended course of action.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#103

Post by throwawayjava »

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…

"Tech" is too broad to say anything useful. A smart high schooler can learn "*nix and coding", and there's no way I would pay the $300K/yr that CS PhD holders cost if all I needed was a sys admin.

But you're not going to build the first self-driving car without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to develop a new pharmaceutical without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to get the sort of branding that being the first to beat the best humans at Go/Chess/Poker can get you without an army including lots of PhDs. And so on.

You're absolutely right that PhDs aren't required for the sort of sys admin and coding work that's accessible to bright high schoolers. But there are very few competent CS PhDs who would even bother applying for those jobs.

Also, your comment isn't germane to the article because the article isn't talking about sys admin and coding jobs. I've literally never seen a job posting for a sys admin job that asks for a PhD. Have you?

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#104

Post by rxhernandez »

entee wrote: post #78
ska wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I'd add that a PhD in the sciences is like getting punched in the face by mother nature every day with a, "hah! try again!". The rigorous thought process that cultivates by the end is hard to replicate without those very hard constraints. It's possible to do, I've met tons of people who have that same rigor without having wasted the time in a PhD, but it's quite an effective method. When I've worked with non-PhDs in…

I haven't seen that at all. To preface the rest, most of everyone I've worked with over the past 6 years had a PhD in electrical engineering, physics or chemistry from top 10 universities (about 20+ people). Maybe 30% had the ability to pick apart an experiment rigorously, most of them would hand wave themselves through the steps in experiments leaving obvious gaping holes that required unnecessary iterations on the experiment. I rarely trusted experimental results unless it came from those 30% of people. Frankly, I have come to see a PhD as expensive piece of paper that is unique in that it indicates you're not a complete idiot.

Moreover, I only have a bachelor's, but I had 6 years of training and humiliating embarrassments from those 30% of people, which I believe strongly contributed to my experimental rigor. I dont know that every person with a PhD has dealt with that kind of pain and would be biased against people that haven't dealt with that pain.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#105

Post by [deleted] »

randcraw wrote: post #48
copperx wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#106

Post by solomatov »

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 have two hedge funds to choose from I would choose neither and choose an index fund :-)

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#107

Post by newen »

valzam wrote: post #22
freyir wrote: post #16

The current "PhD hang up" in tech, if it exists at all, seems to be driven by the competition for ML talent (edit: ML research talent ). To some extent, this is understandable: a typical undergrad CS curriculum is terrible preparation for ML research. I'd even say almost any analytical field: statistics, signal processing, physics, math, etc. is better preparation for working in ML than a conventional undergrad CS cu…

Have you ever worked on ML systems in industry? 90% of all your problems are engineering problems. The myth that you should hire some STEM PhD because they are good at math is ridiculous. I have worked at several AI/ML firms. Only in extremely rare circumstances do your problems require PhD level ML knowledge. But the amount of tech debt produced by 'scientists' is horrendous. Can someone who studied CS 15 years ago…

From my experience, 90% of CS undergrads hate math and don't want to do math. And make that 80% of undergrads doing "research" in machine learning. PhD is a pretty good filter to filter out people who don't like math.

Also PhD's simply have more years experience in writing code than MS graduates. So your comment about circles don't make sense. What makes you say PhD's write worse code? And please don't compare the code they write alongside their research to production code, because research code is throwaway code (seriously).

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#108

Post by abseed »

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…

>The reason employers get hung up on this is because the economic returns to innovation are at an all-time high these days, and so developing that blockbuster new product or highly-efficient new process makes a lot of money.

Or how about this idea: The market is already saturated with (over)qualified candidates so employers have no reason to settle for someone without a PhD vs someone with a PhD (which certainly looks better, even though the benefits may be marginal).

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#109

Post by hnuser355 »

rxhernandez wrote: post #104
entee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add that a PhD in the sciences is like getting punched in the face by mother nature every day with a, "hah! try again!". The rigorous thought process that cultivates by the end is hard to replicate without those very hard constraints. It's possible to do, I've met tons of people who have that same rigor without having wasted the time in a PhD, but it's quite an effective method. When I've worked with non-PhDs in…

I haven't seen that at all. To preface the rest, most of everyone I've worked with over the past 6 years had a PhD in electrical engineering, physics or chemistry from top 10 universities (about 20+ people). Maybe 30% had the ability to pick apart an experiment rigorously, most of them would hand wave themselves through the steps in experiments leaving obvious gaping holes that required unnecessary iterations on the…

I mean PhD might be a piece of paper but most people I know who do them in marketable fields don’t pay tuition and get paid assistantships

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#110

Post by rxhernandez »

hnuser355 wrote: post #109
rxhernandez wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen that at all. To preface the rest, most of everyone I've worked with over the past 6 years had a PhD in electrical engineering, physics or chemistry from top 10 universities (about 20+ people). Maybe 30% had the ability to pick apart an experiment rigorously, most of them would hand wave themselves through the steps in experiments leaving obvious gaping holes that required unnecessary iterations on the…

I mean PhD might be a piece of paper but most people I know who do them in marketable fields don’t pay tuition and get paid assistantships

When I say expense, I mean your time, your youth and the fact that you could have been getting paid a lot more in that time period; all of which are very expensive things to ask of anyone.
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