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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

#161

Post by hnuser355 »

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…

One of the reasons I like the PhD in my case is I consider it to be “fuck you education”. I don’t expect it to give me any significant income advantages in software company, but I feel like it opens enough different areas of employment and gave me a big and strong enough skill set that I’m not intimidated by much.

I suppose it might not work out in such a way for all research though. I was lucky enough that my coursework left me with enough math and statistical skills to either learn or fake my way through most relevant math intensive computing stuff while my actual work was things like parallel optimization schemes for neural network training (and lots of programming in the big frameworks)

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#162

Post by ylmm »

pmiller2 wrote: post #125
x0x0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn’t Google find no useful correlation between either GPA or school attended and job performance? I’m not sure if they categorized people by “easy” or “hard” degrees.

What defines a "useful" correlation?

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#163

Post by pmiller2 »

ylmm wrote: post #162
pmiller2 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t Google find no useful correlation between either GPA or school attended and job performance? I’m not sure if they categorized people by “easy” or “hard” degrees.

What defines a "useful" correlation?

Strong enough to bother trying to figure out if there’s a causal relationship.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#164

Post by minimaxir »

stakhanov wrote: post #148
minimaxir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Of course there's more to data science than just running models. However, those are typically things not discussed in Masters/PhD programs.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#165

Post by tnecniv »

chillacy wrote: post #113
NullPrefix wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From week long install processes to loads of crashes during use, this is not a good example of a PhD only success story field. Clearly, npm ecosystem is a better outcome.

Actually you'll laugh but npm has pretty decent DX (developer experience), especially compared with most chip design tools I've used (which only run on windows and crash a lot).

I still have nightmares about Xilinx FPGA tools.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#166

Post by mcguire »

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.

Huh. I gotta go put my diploma in a ziplock bag.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#167

Post by king_magic »

stakhanov wrote: post #148
minimaxir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don’t disagree with the overall sentiment, I just haven’t seen evidence that folks with masters/PhDs are actually any better at the above than folks without, outside of exceptional scenarios.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#168

Post by stirfrykitty »

black-tea wrote: post #154
stirfrykitty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you ever get to a point where you are financially secure yet want a non-stressful job, you could always teach something like Yearbook at a HS. I know a guy who did this. He cashed out of his IT job after making almost a million. He wife is a nurse. He got tired of the burnout, on-call rotation, and got his teaching certificate, got hired at a high school teaching Yearbook creation and media. He's off 3 months…

What does "teaching Yearbook" mean?

Most high schools have a Yearbook program lead by a certified teacher. That teacher does nothing but ensure photos/video are taken, gathered, and compiled in the form of a Yearbook, which is sold to the students. The classes are focused on learning photography, video, editing of the results. There is a tangible evidence book at the end of it. Kids love it. That teacher deals with kids who WANT to be in that class, so everyone is having fun. Skills are learned. Everyone goes home happy.

Re: American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

#169

Post by bob_theslob646 »

halfeatenpie wrote: post #62

I think the discussions here are missing a critical point. Just like those who mention that their colleague or friend who only has a BS degree or only graduated from high school are able to run circles around those with PhDs, there's a vary level of PhDs as well. PhD means you've had and accomplished that formalized level of training. There are those who formalized training works very well for, there are also those w…

>but what I've understood is that PhDs (in engineering) know how to expand and innovate in a much easier and more structured way than those in industry.

Why do you think that is?

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