American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

The valley in a lot time disregard it which I find refreshing.

Yeh I found in the valley this is becoming more normal. Most of the big guys don't require it anymore. either.

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 curriculum. But PhD in CS with specialization in ML/AI would be ideal for most employers, since exposure to more advanced stats, linear algebra, estimation theory, etc. becomes likely.

The other factor is that ML research is moving quickly and knowledge is being rapidly disseminated in academic conferences. A PhD has an advantage there over a typical undergrad, since they've already spent years learning to parse academic literature.

I think it depends a lot on what it is that you want to do. For example, there are entire teams at companies like Facebook (Core Data Science) and Netflix that hire exclusively people with PhDs. Amazon especially is famous for hiring economists. Microsoft pours huge sums of money into Microsoft Research where the only goal is to fund research with relatively little (short-run) profit motive.

But if you're not on one of these research-oriented teams, then I think it's easy to look at PhDs on your own team and think of them as worthless when in fact they were trained for a pretty different set of things. There's the thing about judging a fish's ability to climb a tree. People seem relatively eager (see other comments) to rip into people with doctoral training for some reason.

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 education needs to be on point.

These and other filters means that a mediocre PhD can get through the hiring gauntlet but only the most kick ass high school graduates can make it through.