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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaymath wrote: post #116
NullPrefix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't read the book, but ... >By the year AD 802,701, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi. Please explain how is this arrogant?

The mentor is comparing people without technical skills (specifically HR employees) to the fictional Eloi - the species of humans which "live a banal life of ease". Meanwhile he compares those with technical skills (presumably himself included) to that of the Morlocks, which is a species engaged in Important Work that supports the idle Eloi. Is the condescension and self-importance more clear now? It's an Us versus T…

[deleted]

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#142

Post by [deleted] »

analognoise wrote: post #93
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#143

Post by why_only_15 »

analognoise wrote: post #93
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…

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 only have a high school education and am currently a software engineer at a FAANG company after getting three offers. Once I leave and go to another company, I found it unlikely that they will care about my original education.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#144

Post by Osmium »

rxhernandez wrote: post #131
dxbydt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ot…

> 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.

It’s only depressing if they feel like they didn’t get anything out of their PhD :)

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#145

Post by nilkn »

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…

I run a team deploying machine learning systems in production, and I agree with most of this. None of us have a formal background in machine learning, and none of us have PhDs. We all came from traditional software engineering backgrounds, and I'd say we were all pretty strong in that area.

Then again, we're not Google Brain, and we're not attempting to do original research or publish papers. We have very concrete goals for systems we want to build, and so far we've been able to achieve success using already discovered methods. Almost everything we do is traditional engineering to build training datasets and deploy models to production on live data. We also spend a considerable amount of time preparing and delivering presentations on our results and services, so believe it or not interpersonal and presentation skills are actually quite important.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#146

Post by stakhanov »

seanwilson wrote: post #123
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…

> 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. I've had this as well along with comments like "academics are bad at X", "academics tend to write code in way Y", "academics can only write prototypes…

+1 on that. I have a PhD, and whenever I join a new workplace I feel like building credibility is an uphill battle where I fight against the ghost of some guy who worked there before who had a PhD and who fit the stereotype of the dysfunctional academic.

I wish that, just because I can do one type of thing well, people wouldn't jump to the conclusion that I can't also do another type of thing well. As in: Just because I understand math, please don't jump to the conclusion that I don't understand databases and can't write clean code. Just because I can see the "right way" to solve a problem, doesn't mean I can't also appreciate arguments in favor of the cost-efficient way of solving 20% of a problem if it gives you 80% of the benefit. etc. etc.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#147

Post by IloveHN84 »

Worked with bunch of PhDs so far, had the delightful experience of seeing them being lower performer in comparison with the rest of the team (myself have a MSc. Degree).

While they might be good at research, on the other side they have some limitations when coming to concrete work. The last one wanted just code and skip all the theoretical work (reading docs, specifications etc), bringing us to let him go, because he wanted only his IDE and no more (not even considering other tasks such as taking care of his own work)

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#148

Post by stakhanov »

minimaxir wrote: post #11
king_magic wrote: post #7

Work 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)

Honestly, I don't think that it's a bad thing at all to require a Masters/PhD as a prerequisite for being a data scientist. There are too many people in this field who just run data through a library in the most obvious way and when it doesn't work they're out of ideas because they don't understand what happens inside the library. They're ruining it for the rest of us, because they're undermining the credibility of the whole field.

Using a library is something you can learn over the course of a vacation by working through a book or tutorial. But understanding what happens inside the library is something that you will never just pick up on the job. You do need actual time, actual training, and interaction with people who already understand this sort of thing very well over the course of many months or years.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#149

Post by sytelus »

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…

You are talking about "old tech". The new tech is an entirely different beast. The new tech is about producing photos styled as if it was painted by Van Gogh. It's about rewriting sentence with correct grammar in word processor. It's about cooling billion dollar data center with highly complex architecture. It's about perfectly removing background from your photo even when it has your hair flying in the air. It's about perfectly translating voice to text and then searching vast knowledge graphs to answer questions. It's about beating world champions in games of highly complex strategy and tactics.

You can't just throw bunch of great coders with high school diplomas at these problems and hope they would workout solutions. Solving any of above problems at the level we solve now would be considered pure magic and utterly surprising just a decade ago. These problems requires extensive mathematical modeling and leaning on research with incremental progress that has been collectively made by 100s of brilliant researchers over multiple decades. This is why PhD is desirable for "new tech".

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