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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

#131

Post by rxhernandez »

dxbydt wrote: post #121
rxhernandez wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you could have been getting paid a lot more in that time I'm sure you are familiar with the concept of fuckyou money. Its a different number for different people. Say that number is 5. I will give you many examples below. Every example is a real living person. I personally know every one of these people. (enterprise programmer in stodgy bank in usa) 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5 (enterprise programmer in stodgy bank in poo…

I mean if we're going by anecdotes:

- I made more on my first day of work than almost any of my professors will make on their last day work.

- I also personally know 3 PhDs at tech companies in the Bay that make substantially less than me despite being 4-6 years older than me.

- I am also acquainted with two people that made an obscene amount of money from their tech skills; one maxed out at a high diploma and the other a PhD.

- The other 20 or so PhDs I know don't make substantially more than I do.

- I've also seen a few PhDs at my last company end up as systems engineers which is incredibly depressing because they could have been employed in that same role if they stopped at a bachelors.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#132

Post by autokad »

scottlegrand2 wrote: post #126
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…

My all-time best PhD moment, as the holder of one of those much-vaunted doctorate thingies, was last year when GlaxoSmithKline told me that too much time had passed since I obtained my PhD therefore it was no longer considered valuable. So watch out everyone, these advanced degrees apparently come with expiration dates now! Always check for freshness.

wow that border lines on age discrimination

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#133

Post by makecheck »

My advice would be, interview PhDs extensively and resist the urge to hire them into senior positions “just because” (as it feels like some of my past jobs were doing).

I say “interview carefully” to avoid generalizing, as there certainly can be PhDs that are excellent. It would be wrong however to assume you can glaze over any lack of experience as if a PhD is some special sign of brilliance; frankly, they may suck.

I have seen “PhDs” flounder worse than any new grad, and have basic problems with critical skills like programming. It is frustrating, as you see the slow-motion failures generated when people are given lots of control without really having spent a significant amount of time working in teams or building skills, etc. or even communicating.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#134

Post by bane »

Anecdotes: I have an M.S. and mostly think it was a waste of time

For the last 15 years or so I've worked in environments with large percentages of PhD co-workers and have come away with this conclusion. Having a PhD seems to indicate that your brain was stretched to one side or another of extreme human thought and left very little in the middle.

On the one side, you've lost the ability to make concrete contributions to almost any project and are nearly incapable of delivering anything with any focus or impact. Junior staff significantly outperform you in almost every task and you seem to think the workplace is where you can come to pontificate and consider all the rest of the humans here are grad students you can badger around to do pointless and off-focus "research" that's really designed to get lots of papers written for you to take to conferences.

On the other, you can figure out how to perform pretty much any of the work of your peers, but can keep climbing the complexity ladder into abstraction heaven and then often bring fire down from the gods to push intractable problems forward.

I've never encountered somebody with a PhD who fit both categories and at times I've been caught in confluences of multiple people of the first category who made work life so unbearable I started having nightmares about it before quitting. People of the second category are rare enough that its often just more useful to hire people without PhDs if you don't have incredibly hard research problems to work on.

The problem is so prevalent that I've known several people drop out of PhD programs because they're afraid of ending up in category one.

One other anecdote, I've often noticed that managers with PhDs will have an incredibly huge blindspot for people in the first category and allow them to run roughshod over the workplace while penalizing staff with fewer credentials who nevertheless outperform their better credentialed coworkers in nearly every work task. It morale destroying and no amount of discussion or other techniques ever seems to overcome that blindspot. I've had people quit over more senior managers continuing to prop up obviously failed employees solely because they have "PhD" next to their name.

I've never encountered this phenomenon among managers without PhDs.

I'm generally incredibly unimpressed by a PhD on a resume. I care much more for a history of solid performance and delivery. But I'm definitely in the minority and have seen dozens of terrible candidates hired because of those three magic letters.

I'm so bothered by both the academic process of getting a PhD as well as the "product" I've encountered in the real world that I decided years ago that I'd rather pursue another BS or MS instead of a PhD.

this comment nails it far more succinctly than I have https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19506719

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#135

Post by bane »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #89
diffserv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, brillia…

There's so many people in the second category for so many reasons, its pretty much made "PhD" a "don't hire unless good reason" filter for me.

Reasons might include: couldn't make it in real jobs and delayed joining the the job force for as long as possible

doesn't want to be held accountable for actual working solutions and likes working towards "novelty"

enjoys approaching every problem with the most complicated possible solution they are aware of

thinks generalization is the only way to approach specific special-case problems, if they can't find a generalized solution then they think its unsolvable even when the special-case solution is fine

has grand research ideas they weren't able to convince anybody in academia to fund and think they can chip away at those ideas by cowing coworkers into working on it for them

likes being the "smart guy in the room" and builds a career of talking a lot with complex technobabble and buzzwords but has no idea what they're saying (I've encountered many many of these myself) -- often has mile long CVs as well

creditialists who think racking up pretend education credits is the most important thing in life

failed academics who point to their large private sector salaries as why they've ended up on the superior path than their old peers

and so on....these are literally descriptions of people I've encountered just in my current job over the past 5 years...it keeps going on and on.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#136

Post by purplezooey »

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…

If the economic returns for innovation are so high why do we have so much wealth inequality... we are in a digression between innovation and economic growth. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24554

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#137

Post by throwawy201903 »

newen wrote: post #107
valzam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

For a CS PhD, I think it's safe to say they got into CS because they have some interest in coding. But that's not always the case for students in other STEM fields. There are plenty of PhD's who were never formally trained in software and their advisors (especially older advisors) consider programming ability akin to operating a TI-83+.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#138

Post by esoterica »

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…

My hypothesis is that people like you who observe a negative correlation between competence and education only encounter such a phenomenon because you work for employers who are not attractive to candidates who have better options. If your company has no name recognition and crap pay, then anyone who is both competent and has the right credentials will be able to get a much better job elsewhere. So your only coworkers will be either people who are competent but don't have a degree, and who can't leave for better pay because they won't pass a resume screen, or people have a CS degree but can't get hired at a more desirable company because they are incompetent. Hence the perceived negative correlation, which is entirely down to selection bias.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#139

Post by blululu »

I think that if I were to rank the people I knew in high school and college by intelligence, the order would be the same at age 21 (before anyone started grad school) as it would be at age 28 (after most people have finished grad school).

The people who were smart in high school are still smart today, regardless of their credentials. Some of the smartest people I know have PhDs, and some do not.

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