The Ph.D.-Industry Gap

https://chronicle.com/blogs/phd/2013/09/19/the-ph-d-industry-gap/

by unignorant • 13 years ago

158 222 13 years ago

hapless• 13 years ago

"the world’s most respected, business-savvy professors can misjudge companies’ valuations of the doctoral degrees they so thoughtfully hand out"

It is impossible to convince a man of something when his salary rides on his not believing it. Your professors have certain incentives to hold particular beliefs about the value of a phD.

There is no polite way to say that, which must be why it was not included in the essay.

glesica• 13 years ago

This just isn't true. If anyone was arguing that PhDs in general were worthless, then it would be a very reasonable point to think about. But in this case, it isn't really the PhD itself under discussion, it's the preparation and skills acquired through a course of a PhD. The difference is that the specific nature of a PhD program is pretty flexible. If professors see that their candidates aren't doing well in the job market, they can, and will, make adjustments to their programs.

javert2• 13 years ago

From what I understand, professors' salaries normally do not depend on handing out PhDs at all. At least, not once they have tenure.

You need to have students to have grants. But the reason you gets grants is to pay your students. So, anticipating that this issue may come up, I don't think that's it, either.

ak217• 13 years ago

Actually, there is a set of incentives for professors to hand out PhDs. Before tenure, professors have to successfully graduate PhD students (or at least get most of the way there), otherwise questions will be raised in tenure review. After tenure, failure to graduate students equates to failure to attract new ones, loss of prestige, loss of connectivity to their academic network by way of a graduated student, etc.

sliverstorm8• 13 years ago

You need to have students to help you in your research, and you won't have students if you have a reputation for never ever awarding a PhD. It's a give-and-take relationship.

resu• 13 years ago

You'll probably have a much easier time if you're willing to sell your soul and apply for quant jobs on wall street.

PaulHoule3• 13 years ago

Not these days.

Back in the 80's and 90's there were a handful of academics thinking about quantitative finance and no programs oriented at creating that sort of person, so of course you could walk out of your no-future physics PhD and get a quant job easily.

Since then there has been a shake-out ad you've actually got to be world class at something in particular if you want a quant job.

Many "quants" are now people who do algorithmic trading on their own accounts, the way people did day trading in the 90's. This may sound glamorous but it is definitely a business that comes and goes. You need a LOT of capital to do it safely, and most people blow up at least one account in the process of becoming good at trading.

ivan_ah2• 13 years ago

I have a PhD and have been talking to different employers and they don't know what to do with me. Sure I can code, sure I can sysadmin, sure I can solve problems, and convert cutting edge research into practical applications, but what exactly am-I good for? The chameleon analogy is very good...

So I say, f*ck it, and keep doing what I know how to do best: teach, write and build tools for teaching and writing.

To all chemistry and biology PhDs out there, please get in touch with me if you want to write a short textbook to introduce UGRADs to your field. Together, we can partner and take over the textbook industry.

msutherl3• 13 years ago

There are jobs for chameleons. It's just that there are fewer of them and companies don't tend to understand that they need them, so they don't explicitly hire for them.

Companies hire people to make a specific problem go away. If you're not a "make a specific problem go away" guy, then you need to find another way in.

I'm a fan of, rather than responding to job calls, identifying what companies you want to work for, deciding what you want to do for them, then going and meeting the people that can put you in the position to do those things. If you can't meet them directly, find people that can introduce you. Make a plan and give it about one year (these things take time).

ivan_ah2• 13 years ago

Thx for the advice, especially the comment about the time-scale of the process.

I'm going to start looking into some of the R&D labs out there.

msutherl3• 13 years ago

The elephant in the room is that if you're a successful academic, you should be either networking to get invited into the sort of position that companies don't post openings for or founding a company. Jobs, and especially job calls, are for suckers.

throwaway19793• 13 years ago

Good point. I've been mulling the founder route. It is annoying that my reason for founding a company was that I was unhappy in an academic job rather than having an idea burning in my soul.

asafira4• 13 years ago

Hi everyone,

So I am actually a PhD student in physics, but I've been in love with tech for as long as I remember. I am actually doing a master's degree in CS along the way, both because I'm incredibly interested and because I thought that would really give me an edge when I want to finally go into the tech sector. (i'd be able to say more than "I have the technical chops and have done well throughout my academic career.")

This article troubles me though. Am I going to be faced with an employment brick wall in a few years? I have a lot of friends in tech, and they are very supportive of me joining. Will my PhD actually stifle my ability to get jobs I want? I haven't seen very convincing articles about it, but if there are Stanford CS PhD students having difficulties, what's going on?

I plan to do an industry internship next summer, and I hope that will at least help. What if I want to go into product management though? I have a google interview coming up in two weeks for a software engineering role, but I was shut down for even an interview for their APM roles. Maybe I needed more tech experience? Would this summer internship be enough? It's just unclear and troubling.

eshvk3• 13 years ago

Why are you doing a PhD in physics if you don't want to do research in physics? A PhD in physics won't "stifle" your ability to get jobs you want. The thing that will "stifle" your ability to get jobs you want is not having the relevant skills or not being able to play the game of interviewing.

E.g. I interviewed a physicist for a data science position. While he had worked on a lot of problems which could be categorized as data science problems, 95% of the problems he was working had one specific tool that he used, Principal Component Analysis. It was kind of hard to get him to think of another ways of solving a problem.

wbl• 13 years ago

Some of us think that contributing to human knowledge is worth five years of our life, even if we might not be able to continue contributing.

asafira4• 13 years ago

Part of the reason I'm doing a PhD in physics is, of course, because I enjoy the work. Everyday I come in and I always feel like I have something to learn from the people I work with. I feel like I grow as a person because I'm constantly learning new things from my peers - whether that be something purely theoretical, hands-on electronics work, cleanroom work, machine shop work, optics work, or, yes, coding. Could the same be true in industry? Absolutely. Is it nearly as guaranteed? I'm sure not. I definitely have friends that are starting to gain the golden handcuffs at their companies, and they've only been working for 2 years.

Moreover, I don't think it's fair to say that people waste their time doing a PhD in physics. Sure, they could be learning a lot more job-specific skills, but the point is that the people who do a PhD in physics absolutely have the ability to learn those things. I'm sure if the physicist used PCA it wouldn't take him long to learn plenty of other ML techniques. I think the skills you learn during a PhD aren't as simple as just listing out the technical things you became familiar with. (Still, I'm certainly considering leaving grad school, but I don't think it's an obvious decision.)

Of course, I think there is a lot more to a job than the technical skills you bring to the table --- your ability to communicate, your understanding of the market & product, and your ability to work well with others. (Yes, I'm fully aware physics people don't often hold gold medals in these categories). I think that doing an internship could help in these respects, and it's why I'm interested in doing one.

Lewisham4• 13 years ago

I have a PhD in CS from UC Santa Cruz, and I was hired by Google out of school. The key is to do internships: just like undergrads, you have to prove to companies that you can do the work, and internships are the best way of doing that. I did two internships at Google, and did the conversion interviews.

What I don't understand is why you are applying to Google if you're doing a Physics PhD. Why become a doctor of Physics and then throw it away trying to apply for jobs that have zero overlap? You're not trained for the job, and I strongly suspect this is the problem the OP was having. Why aren't you applying to NASA or SpaceX or something?

asafira4• 13 years ago

I hear it's actually not that uncommon for physicists to become data scientists. More importantly though, I was successful in physics as an undergraduate, and it's sort of the academic culture to continue onto to grad school (as well as the culture in my family). In any case, I could always leave grad school if I want to, but I think it's also helping me gain a better computer science background (I've only taken 3-4 computer science classes so far...)

I'm not applying to NASA or SpaceX because I'm really interested in consumer tech, and always have been. Honestly, maybe I have the total wrong idea for what I want to do, and I understand that. That's again why I want to do an internship.

I actually have a Google interview in a couple of weeks. If you don't mind me asking, did you work at Google as a researcher or software engineer?

throwaway19793• 13 years ago

I like the internship idea. However, I should add that these should be non-research. I did internships at industry labs - this seemed like a good idea at the time since I was prepping for a career in research. Now that I want to get out of it, those research internships aren't worth as much as the Google internships.

As a someone who is 5 years out of his PhD (working at a research lab), I'm a bit perplexed at how I can make up for the lost years of industry experience. The best idea I have now is to start my own company.

shoyer2• 13 years ago

I just finished my PhD in theoretical physics and had a relatively easy time finding a "data scientist" like job in the tech industry. I had two jobs offers from two interviews, neither of which were very close to my PhD research.

I did do an industry internship toward the end of my PhD and I think it made a big difference. Not only did I have the experience to show potential employers that I was serious about going into industry, but I also learned more about software engineering in 3 months of my internship than 5 years of academic coding during my PhD. And I ended up with an offer from the company where I did the internship.

I actually think it's an even better idea to do a software engineering internship early in your PhD if you're doing some sort of computational science, because you'll pick up skills that nobody will teach you in grad school but that are also valuable for writing academic code.

As you know, industry internships are way outside the norm for physics, but they're pretty standard for computer science grad students. In my view, not doing an internship was this guy's first mistake, although I have no idea what to make of the fact that he had no offers after 30+ interviews, which does strike me as highly anomalous.

asafira4• 13 years ago

Just so I understand, you actually did a software engineering internship, but ended up in a more data science role, right? I'm curious just so I better understand if even the standard software engineering role internship helps for more than just software engineering jobs after grad school.

It also strikes me as odd that this person had no offers after that many interviews, but the truth is that there are a lot of other factors that go into these decisions. Maybe this person wasn't the best at communicating? Maybe this person sold himself as an all-around generalist, and the companies didn't really know what to do with him?

Otherwise though, I'm happy to hear about physicists going into tech!

xianshou• 13 years ago

I've interviewed a lot of Ph.D. candidates for software engineering jobs at startups, and have only ever encountered two problems: (1) lack of ability to code, and (2) mismatched expectations.

Poor coding skill accounts for perhaps 80% of the industry no-hires. Well...that's not exactly fair. Poor coding skill under pressure. Most Ph.D. candidates are either out of practice or used to taking a long time to think about and solve a coding problem. That's great for academic software, but misaligns with both rapid development and (importantly for the candidates) the style of interviews. Most Ph.D.s wither under the expectation of producing a feature very quickly.

Some Ph.D. engineers can code extremely well. If they don't end up at the company, it's because the following dialogue happened, implicitly or explicitly:

PhD - Look, I'm great.

Company - Yes, you are. How about $X?

PhD - Given my specialized skill, I was expecting more like $1.5X.

Company - Well, $.8X is what we pay the new grads, so $X is what we'll pay you.

In other words, their ability is clear, but their market value isn't enhanced very much by their specialization, when most companies are looking for the skills that developers get during their bachelor's or master's.

anologwintermut2• 13 years ago

1.25x, let alone 1.5x for a PhD to write code seems a little high. Typically a PhD doesn't make you a better software engineer, so why pay more (other than its expected)? $1.5x for a PhD to solve hard problems your company needs solutions to and can't hand to a random new hire, on the other hand, is reasonable.

Perhaps they think they are getting hired to do the later and you are hiring them to do the former ?

sliverstorm8• 13 years ago

Simple suggestion: Perhaps they heard that PhD's make 1.5X, and haven't yet realized that the PhD's making 1.5X are solving the hard problems, not working as code monkeys? Thus they assume that the degree simply merits 1.5X for the same work.

timr4• 13 years ago

"Typically a PhD doesn't make you a better software engineer, so why pay more (other than its expected)?"

I don't know if a PhD makes you a better writer of code, but it definitely makes you more determined, focused and unflappable person. (That's pretty much all it does, actually. Everything else is a stereotype.) These are all qualities that are worth buying in an actual engineer.

msutherl3• 13 years ago

The problem here is that PhD's should not be applying for developer jobs. It's like a fluid mechanics expert applying for a job as a plumber.

bluekeybox2• 13 years ago

Wrong analogy. Your analogy compares demands of a specialized non-intellectual profession (plumbing) that does not value general problem solving with abilities of someone who is purportedly good in general problem-solving in addition to possessing industry-specific expert knowledge (your fluid mechanics expert).

While here we are talking about a profession (software engineering) that does value general problem-solving ability except it also requires additional industry-specific expert knowledge.

batguano2• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the classic joke:

A surgeon has a backed up sink, and he calls a plumber. The plumber comes, works for 15 minutes, fixes the drain, and gives the surgeon his bill.

"Six hundred dollars?!?," the surgeon exclaims. "For fifteen minutes? I'm a surgeon and even I don't make that kind of money!"

"Yeah," replies the plumber. "I didn't make that kind of money when I was a surgeon, either."

eriksank4• 13 years ago

That would be the same like saying that PhD's should not be applying for jobs that require typing, or touching a keyboard in any way. It would be like a fluid mechanics expert applying for a job as a secretary.

hacknat• 13 years ago

I think this analogy sums up the problem and the social dilemma it creates quite nicely. Who wants to hire someone who has past experience that pretty readily indicates they will not be interested in the work you are providing them.

beambot2• 13 years ago

Two questions:

(1) From your observations, what is the rate of poor coding skills among PhD vs non-PhDs? (ie. the PhD may still be a partial signal for better (or worse?) ability.)

(2) A PhD has 4-6 years of experience over a "new grad"... so 0.8X vs 1.0X seems off to me too. Most companies I've spoken w/ allow each year of a PhD to account for 0.5-1.0 years of industry experience depending on the individual's skillsets and the job's responsibilities.

phamilton2• 13 years ago

Fog Creek values a PhD at 1 year of experience. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Ladder.html

RogerL2• 13 years ago

Years of experience don't matter (IMO). I will pay you based on the value you bring. PhDs have demonstrated the ability to read the literature and conduct research under supervision. That is not necessarily very valuable (knowledge gained during that process may or may not be very valuable). And, honestly, the research often seems very mickey-mouse compared to real world problems, of the "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" variety. That's nice, but does it get me to launch with the feature sets I need? If not, your value is not high. If so, well, name your price.

dchichkov• 13 years ago

From my experience I would NOT call PhDs coding skills as poor. It is just that the coding style is so different. And tend to go toward extremes. From ad-hoc approaches to the extremes of elaborations that attempt to solve every possible future problem. Sometimes without common sense, laziness and foresight of just a regular engineer.

There are reasons for that. It's just that the research grade code IS different. And labs tend to have their own cultures and approaches. Sometimes to the extreme of writing in their own languages. But in some cases it can be very advantageous.

jimbokun• 13 years ago

My group just hired a C.S. Ph.D. to write code.

Her coding skills were fine, but lacked some things very common in industry experience, like relational databases, Object Relational Mapping frameworks, distributed version control systems, and continuous integration tools.

None of this has been a problem. She has only been on our team a couple of weeks, but there was no delay to her being able to contribute to our code base relative to any other developers we have hired.

henrik_w• 13 years ago

You mentioned "poor coding skill under pressure". Did you assess that during interviews? Because in my experience, the pressure during an interview is not at all like the pressure while developing software. At an interview, you may have to come up with a solution in, say, half an hour. At work, you can usually sleep on a problem, and come back with a solution the next day, even if you are under pressure to ship a new feature. In other words, nothing like the pressure during an interview.

eru2• 13 years ago

On the other hand, interview problems are often way easier.

walshemj• 13 years ago

Pressure is not doing fizbuzz at an interview its when the billing system you are in charge of has its first 5 mill month and the CTO nudges you and says "this had better be right other wise we are both out of a job"

hclee• 13 years ago

Same thing goes here in hardware industry. Having Ph.D. does not indicate how good they are. It really depends on individuals and their mindsets. Ph.D. with specialized major anyway have learn things over at new workplace. So whoever catch up fast and do hard with 'i will contribute this' attitude makes better results.

Someone may argue about this but people with less advanced degree tend to obey more to management.

jerryhuang100• 13 years ago

That PhD-Industry Gap is more about the hiring managers' disconnects between Science and technical techniques such as ability to code etc. It's just as ridiculous to request a linguistic scientist to be fluent in multiple foreign languages. I guess even Jeff Dean might have problem dealing with today's coding interview questions of regular software engineering jobs (or not, according to Jeff Dean facts). Those kind of hiring managers just do not have visions and would just miss the potentials of solving pioneering questions such as BigTable and MapReduce.

morgante4• 13 years ago

Accurate, except it's not hiring managers who are making that miscalculation.

By and large, hiring managers will see a PhD and be like "yay, give them an interview." Its the interview with an engineer where things break apart, because the engineer expects a PhD to be solving things the same way he would despite coming from totally different backgrounds.

(This is born out in the OP's experience, as he got many interviews but few offers.)

For once, hiring managers aren't to blame.

yalogin• 13 years ago

Well the other side of the equation also must be true. You should not be interviewing a PhD candidate unless you think you need one for that job. Else if you are interviewing a PhD even though a regular programmer would do, its not fair to the candidate. There in lies the main problem. The expectations are high for both parties involved. Also by definition they are already way too specialized and steering away from that specialization would be tough for a PhD as well.

VLM• 13 years ago

"You should not be interviewing a PhD candidate unless you think you need one for that job."

Consider we produce twice as many PHDs as the business sector requires. This is probably accurate. From a humane perspective, what should we do with half the grads, soylent green seems a little harsh... The social perspective is they should just sit on an ice floe as it floats away in the ocean, which seems wrong.

We're moving toward a class based neo-feudalist system. The first time around with feudalism, the bottom of the barrel of knights and barons and such got wiped out in more or less continuous low-level warfare. In our new neofeudal era we don't have a solution for the bottom of the barrel of our various classes of titled nobility, leading to all kinds of angst.

To mix some metaphors it seems a waste of talent and economic costs to euthanize the bottom half of the modern Baronry after all that education and accomplishment.

Although it would screw around with modern feudalistic class based ideas, maybe we should be able to arbitrarily officially reject titles of nobility. Better to have a lower 50%-ile PHD writing CRUD apps as a code monkey than turn them into hamburger.

timr4• 13 years ago

"Poor coding skill accounts for perhaps 80% of the industry no-hires. Well...that's not exactly fair. Poor coding skill under pressure."

I have a PhD, and by now I think it's safe to say that I'm a productive programmer, but it was hard to get (back) into the industry. I've experienced the bias against PhD-holding coders firsthand.

The interesting thing is that I've now also been on the interviewer side of this equation more than a few times, and I know that a lot of programmers have a huge inferiority complex that really gets revved up when they hear that a candidate has a PhD. I've seen the hiring bar shift dramatically higher for a candidate simply because interviewers on the loop knew about the advanced degree.

Given that most companies have virtually no interviewer training, and even fewer checks or balances on the attitudes and predispositions of their interviewers, I suspect that this latter problem is a far more parsimonious explanation for the hiring gap for PhDs than is the presumption that >80% of doctoral graduates can't write code.

eruditely• 13 years ago

Maybe you really are that bad, but if you honestly aren't then how horrible

IanCal3• 13 years ago

I suspect that this latter problem is a far more parsimonious explanation for the hiring gap for PhDs than is the presumption that >80% of doctoral graduates can't write code.

Combined with the terrible quality of candidates I've had apply, ">80% can't code" is probably valid over a random sample.

If you add in some confirmation bias you'd probably explain a lot. However, I'd also add that I'm not shocked at the idea there are a lot of people who are great at academic research but terrible production coders.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

I am fed up to the back teeth with "speed" as a positive metric for coding.

used to taking a long time to think about and solve a coding problem.

that's a good thing. A good friend of mine is a phd and lead programmer on a radio telescope project. my solution to a problem he described was quick to code and hellish to run, his involved maths I did not understand took five lines and ran super fast. he chose an algorithm that fit the problem domain better - because of more extensive training than I got.

Algorithms count massively. Google is built on an algorithm that fits the problem domain better. finding and applying better algorithms to give "unfair" competitive advantage is a very good thing

so I want to see a slow code movement like a slow food movement

- Producing higher quality software delivers more business value in the medium term than lower quality

- Iterating to a solution is often slower than applying the best algorithm directly

- it takes time to understand and evolve a story

- rewrites are a good thing. most books and film scripts are rewritten a lot

- daily status meetings encourage trying to do something each day instead of taking a week to make something fantastic

jerguismi2• 13 years ago

I see no problem here. If algorithms count massively, then those slow skillful algorithm coders can start their own companies, and because algorithms count massively surely soon the market will be full of companies that require algorithmic skills and don't value speedy hacks.

But just surprisingly, the market looks like it is full of those crappy startups, which value speed over quality, and don't do rewrites. Wonder why that is so.

quanticle3• 13 years ago

The problem is that for the vast majority of business applications there is no algorithmic innovation required. I mean, to build a basic CRUD app, you need no algorithms knowledge at all -- rough and ready experience will serve. Even for data processing, unless you're processing truly vast (e.g. terabytes to petabytes) amounts of data, the algorithms you learn in an undergraduate introduction to algorithms class will work just fine.

At this point, employers quite rationally want someone who can put together a combination of basic algorithms in 5 minutes over someone who takes a week to come up with an a elegant jewel of an algorithm that no one else at the company can understand. To put it another way, just like the slow food movement hasn't really made a dent in fast food culture, I don't expect a slow code movement to make much of a dent in the "ship yesterday" culture of modern software development.

eob2• 13 years ago

As someone who interviewed PhDs in a prior life, and is now getting a PhD, this is an excellent summary of the situation in the CS realm.

I would add, though, that a lot of people in industry mistakenly believe that what the PhD provides is specialization. It is true that you end up with a specialized skill, but you also end up with the ability to ask important questions, cut through all the things you could do and decide what you should do, experience managing long-term projects, proposing work, managing people (undergrads, usually), and mentoring, just to name a few.

So to industry folks out there who get occupationally sucpicious when interviewing a PhD ("just to make sure, are you comfortable not continuing your current research?") try asking a few questions like, "besides your research topic, what do you think you've gotten out of the last 6 years that will help you at this job". Yeah that's a softball question for an interview, but it will help them show you all the other things besides some obscure academic topic that they've learned.

tlogan• 13 years ago

The main problem with Ph.D. degrees (from US and world) is that they sometimes really poorly equip you for a job in our field. I don't think coding is really what is missing - it is just misalignment (lagging?) of the curriculum and projects with fast changing pace of the industry. They are a little behind...

jblow• 13 years ago

The article is hard to read because it feels like this guy is really fooling himself.

If he were as good in academia as his rhetoric claims (building software that "revolutionized" a field) he should have no problems. He should not even need a job, as he ought to be able to just start something. He should have no shortage of strong ideas about what he could be doing.

Instead he is aimlessly searching for a job.

So, I have no choice but to disbelieve his rhetoric. He probably isn't particularly good at anything, and just stumbled through the PhD system. Well, surprise, that isn't worth much!

eli_gottlieb7• 13 years ago

So go find his academic webpage and check if he actually did receive a research award from Stanford's CS department as a PhD student.

All his external awards point to someone who very probably can do any tech job the industry could throw at him, in contrast to the usual developer who just has a self-generated github profile and "Ruby ninja rockstar" on his resume.

einai• 13 years ago

Well not everyone wants to "start something". Starting a business is risky and requires tremendous dedication. Some people work better in technical/supporting roles. Perhaps after years getting paid peanuts in grad school, he wants something more stable?

guerrilla3• 13 years ago

Indeed, and who says this guy has the management and commercial skills to be able to pull it off? As I think many people here know, starting a business is way more than just the concept & application.

vbs_redlof• 13 years ago

How do you "stumble" through the PhD system?

twistedpair• 13 years ago

Very few programs will throw you out on the street. I've heard of a few people that got their PhD's eventually for passing go enough times. It happens.

Iftheshoefits2• 13 years ago

This happens frequently enough, in all disciplines, including the "hard" ones like math, physics, etc.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

Academia doesn't teach you how to fight for yourself in the world. The eventual injustices (observed on the scale of many years) are brutal, but the feedback cycle is so delayed that the judgment-of-character skills that most of us learn in their 20s (through humiliating, frustrating trial-and-error amid entry-level grunt work that, now that the corporate-ladder system is antiquated, serves no point) they never get.

In the corporate world, if adversity comes after you and you don't defeat it, you'll be out of work in a few days. You start to learn the signs. In the academic world, your career just stalls out one day leaving you with no idea why, and the causes were probably decisions you made years ago.

So it's quite possible, if not common, for very talented people to have no idea what the fuck to do for themselves out on the battlefield. That's how they end up aimless and clueless at ~27-30 despite strong technical talent.

throwaway19793• 13 years ago

Once again, your comments are on the mark. I'm a systems PhD and wow ... it seems messed up. I don't feel satisfied writing yet another paper that no one will read. At the same time, I feel a CS undergrad with 3-4 years of industry experience is better at writing professional software than me. It feels like a kind of purgatory. I have my gripes with academia but I worked very hard to earn my PhD. I'm very surprised that the PhD ended up being worth a lot less than what I thought it would be worth. I'm not even talking about financial compensation - I'm talking about lack of opportunities. I thought a systems PhD would mean I could always get a job in industry ... so not true :(

selimthegrim6• 13 years ago

As a (perhaps permanent) refugee from academia, my $0.02.

You get out of academia what you put into it. If you go in with no plan of action or just wanting to be like your mentor/advisor, or solely dependent on his funding or the department's TAship still thinking this is like undergrad, but only you get paid for it, you will be in for a rude awakening.

The signs do take longer, maybe one or two years, but they are there. Your prospective advisor has no pull in the department, or can't twist elbows and get a RAship for you. Or he puts you on a project to reproduce someone else's experiment with unreplicable results. You start to notice his papers with foreign colleagues have serious mistakes that get through peer review. You wonder why he hasn't been properly funded in years.

I managed to get out alive, with a degree and a good publication on the way (with people at another institution), despite one adviser leaving the university nine months after I joined and everyone else being broke. How did I do this? I came in with a overarching research goal (learn how new techniques in quantum information could be used to solve chemical problems), one that encompassed more just my advisor's research area. I executed on the overall goal and when things got harder, I doubled down even more. I didn't let departmental barriers stop me from learning what I knew I needed (quantum field theory for condensed matter) to solve problems, even if those courses weren't in my department and even if the connection wasn't immediately apparent. I sought out conferences on my own, paid for them myself, networked my way into summer visiting positions and invited talks, because nobody was sitting there and spoon-feeding me little bite sized research topics. In fact, I lived in my office for three months when I couldn't afford rent anymore and no one gave a shit. I am reasonably sure people would probably have taken 3-4 months to wonder where I had gone to had I jumped off a bridge.

My central point here is that many people in grad school don't recognize that your adviser's interests and incentives are not necessarily your own (just like your boss's). Unlike your boss, your adviser will never be held responsible for bad management. If your _department's_ incentives and interests become unmoored from your own -- well, then in the words of Mr. Garrison it's a "big lowercase t for time to leave"

The sooner you recognize that and find a happy medium between your needs and theirs, the sooner you can be productive for all concerned. Every contingency measure I took in terms of classes, planning, networking in terms of the overall goal, all were leveraged and all were necessary to bring things to a reasonable close.

I know this was posted here a while back, but this really is the best description I've read (he finished, while I left with a Master's and may go back elsewhere but the hustle necessary was much the same.) http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm

telephonetemp• 13 years ago

I agree with you about feedback in the academia but what common kind of adversity in the corporate world puts you out of work in a few days as opposed to the next layoff at least months down the line?

Swizec• 13 years ago

The problem, essentially, boils down to the fact that the author had a Ph.D. but was a junior at whatever the companies he was applying for needed. But didn't want to get a junior level position.

This is where "And (2) my Ph.D. background, while impressive, just didn’t fit the profile of a data scientist (whose background is usually in machine learning or statistics), a product manager (Ph.D.’s couldn’t even apply for Google’s Associate Product Manager Program until recently), or a programmer (my experience writing code at a university, even on a product with 47,000 unique downloads, didn’t count as coding “experience”)."

I don't know about the other profiles, but programmers with only academia experience rarely code better than complete juniors. I've recently helped a team of Stanford grads get to grips with coding in an industry environment and the biggest surprise seemed to be that just because it works it doesn't mean it's done. You have to make it supportable, make it workable-on by others etc. etc.

PaulHoule3• 13 years ago

Heck, I'm pretty terrified of the code written by CS professors.

One time I got a C code from one of the leading lights in machine learning, compiled it, ran it, and it segfaulted right away.

I started up the debugger, set a breakpoint in main() and it didn't even get that far.

I looked at the code and saw that he was statically allocating a 4GB array that he never used. I guess this didn't cause a problem on the 64 bit machine he was using, but it caused the code to blow up on 32 bit machines. I removed the array and it worked OK.

I was lucky to be programming in Java while it was still in beta when I was working on my PhD. One thing I noticed was that even the more computer savvy physics professors didn't get object orientation or any of the architectural concepts around it at all, so I was often called a "bad programmer" and told I should be more like somebody who cut his teeth on FORTRAN.

dalai• 13 years ago

A "data scientist" or a "programmer" are hardly senior level positions.

In my experience as a PhD with (currently) almost 4 yrs postdoc experience, I rarely get an interview when I apply for an industry position. I think there is a good element of truth in what the original author is saying about a gap. As PhD students and postdocs we do a lot of things. We have to write code, we have to manage students, teach, publish, apply for grants, manage research groups or entire projects, handle scientific and financial reporting, etc. The problem is that our skills don't exactly match company requirements that normally have different people for most of these tasks. To make things worse, people tend to believe that we will be arrogant pricks who will demand really high salaries even though we are clueless about how things work outside academia. Just look at some of the comments here.

For an entry level programming position a recent CS BSc appears much more desirable and cheaper than any PhD. I doubt that we even get much of a chance to show how good (or bad) we are. For higher level positions a PhD rarely has the "right" experience. What we are left with is usually something that fits well with our research. This is what the author found and as far as I know he is not in the minority.

wtvanhest• 13 years ago

Hey, if you don't customize both your resume and the message to the job you won't get it.

You are getting beat by people who want it more and who don't feel entitled by having the PhD.

foobarian• 13 years ago

I was in a similar situation, and I did notice a certain uneasiness in my interviewers due to the degree. I thought the reason was that it's hard to believe that someone who gets a fancy degree would be willing to stoop down to a software engineering job. That's very important to employers because they don't believe you will stick around. My interviewers asked me repeatedly if I was aware that the job wasn't going to have any glamorous paper writing or research or going to conferences, and that I would have to gasp write code. I caught on quick and was able to reassure them, and after a few fizzbuzz type questions they were convinced.

And amazingly, they told me that many Ph.D. candidates who come through cannot write a single line of code. I don't understand how that's possible but I would be wary too, in their shoes.

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

As someone who searched for jobs as a de facto CS PhD, I can relate to what the author is saying. PhD's tend to slot into very specific niches, and if you don't fill that niche they won't want you, even if your skills are a superset of the skills they need. I was rejected for certain jobs because my research wasn't closely related enough. People whose research was squarely in that area had no problem getting these jobs. In the end, my job ended up being something I didn't realize I was qualified for, but with hindsight I fitted the niche perfectly.

Part of the problem is simply that the market is "thin". There are less jobs, and less PhD's than there are people with Masters or Bachelors in CS. So the matching process takes longer. People won't want to hire you for a job you are overqualified for, and in the long run this would be bad for both parties.

As to the people who think that professors are just over-confident so they can keep churning out PhD's, I think this is wrong for two reasons. First, the situation is subtle, and hard to understand for someone who isn't actually going through it. Second, the market is not bad, it's just very peculiar: as you can see, the author did get a good job in the end, it just took a lot of time.

georgemcbay2• 13 years ago

In my experience (as someone who dropped out of undergrad to enter the industry, fwiw) there is a pretty widely held bias against people with PhDs in quite a lot of the software development industry. Almost like having spent the time to earn a PhD is like a way worse version of coming to a (non-financial sector) software development job interview in a three piece suit with a tie... you're just instantly distrusted by a lot of folks. I'm sure it varies from company to company, but I've seen this behavior repeatedly over many years.

I don't agree with it, for what it's worth. I do understand the rough justification that academic work is very different than real-world coding, but even if you accept that reasoning 100% then at the very worst a PhD should be seen as a neutral to slightly positive indicator (at least they see things through) if the person is otherwise a fantastic fit, not a negative. However, in my experience this negative bias towards PhDs in the greater software development sphere is a real phenomenon.

dccoolgai2• 13 years ago

Re: the suit-and-tie thing... I am a dev doing interviews now, and where I grew up (blue-collar midwest), wearing a suit to an interview is a sign of respect, so I've been doing it... not a good idea?

eli_gottlieb7• 13 years ago

In the tech industry, primarily the West Coast tech industry, it's a sign of being a "business guy" or worse, a "financial guy". Tech guys wear black T-shirts or turtlenecks, hoodies, and sweater-vests.

(That was intended to be a joke, but it's also a surprisingly accurate description ;-).)

awakeasleep• 13 years ago

Let's not oversimplify. Ignoring the culture of the company you're interviewing with is a bad idea.

If you're a serious candidate, it's hard to imagine a phone screening where you don't ask a few questions to feel out that sort of thing.

georgemcbay2• 13 years ago

Already basically covered by some other responses, but it depends greatly upon company culture which varies between industry and region. I can't speak to your region at all as I've never worked in the midwest, but in a lot of places I have worked (which includes the east and west coasts), employees at pure software shops often have a negative view of anyone wearing a "suit", including to an interview. It isn't going to tank your chances with an otherwise good interview, but it can leave a negative first impression which is something that can snowball out of control on an interview if you aren't careful.

If you're totally unsure for a given interview, a good rule of thumb is to ask about the expected dress up front and then dress a little bit better than what the answer is.

Negitivefrags• 13 years ago

Just ask what kind of clothing to wear before you go to the interview. It's not an unreasonable question to ask and prevents the chance of any kind of awkwardness.

auggierose2• 13 years ago

I went to a job interview at G-Research in London earlier this year, spending 7 hours there. Afterwards my recruiter told me, they were surprised how strong I was (despite having a Ph.D. and all), but they just wished I had shown a little more effort during the interview. I later found out that "a little more effort" was code for: You should have worn a suit instead of your hoodie. So glad I didn't get this job :-)

TheCoelacanth• 13 years ago

I think it depends a lot on the location. I work at a software company in the DC area where most people wear shorts or jeans to work, and yet still virtually every candidate that comes in for an interview is wearing a suit.

kirk21• 13 years ago

If you have the 'right topic' like chemistry, a PhD can do wonders for your career. If you work on other topics (like movie studies), not so much if you don't want to become an academic.

Small weekend project: What type of PhD student are you? https://bohr.typeform.com/to/PPzzY8

dkhenry2• 13 years ago

You know poor candidates can go to great schools, they can even get doctorates. They can also be useless, and the set of skills that make you useful are not necessarily the set that you get from an advanced degree.

Also FWIW the part about "dropped out of PhD a plus" is intentionally taken out of context. The full context from the link

    BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent (PhD or dropped out of PhD a plus)

After reading that I am very leery of taking anything else he said at face value. This is a target piece that is clearly putting the headline above the truth.

eli_gottlieb7• 13 years ago

You know poor candidates can go to great schools, they can even get doctorates.

Yeah, but by definition of "great schools" and "doctorates", it's not all that likely.

dkhenry2• 13 years ago

No, but it happens, in any school at any degree level there are people who "pass" who shouldn't. Even in my lowly engineering school ( graduating class of Computer Engineers was maybe 30 ) there were a number of people who should not have been given a degree, but since they fulfilled the basic requirements they were. Those were the individuals who were looking for jobs after graduation. A majority of the people had jobs well before their senior year.

I am not saying this guy is a slouch who got what he had coming to him, I don't know him. I am saying that no compelling argument was made that this article was anything more then conjecture.

RogerL2• 13 years ago

I don't know the author, so I cannot say how his interviews went. In general I think you have to take control of the interviews and just show the person why you are valuable. It's hard to find talent; the person interviewing wants to like you, if for no other reason than she can get back to coding.

The PhDs that I've interviewed have applied for very senior positions, yet not brought all of the skills needed. Which is more than jusr abstract thought. You need to turn out code that is maintainable and readable by the team. You need to ruthlessly reduce the problem and algorithms to a level that allows you to launch before you run out of money. Far more than being a thinker or researcher, you need to be an engineer. You need to be very, very productive. And so on. I'm not sure what the answer is, but there is a pretty big gulf. You look at the projects and okay, it's somewhat interesting, but impractical. You ask them how they'd solve a problem that you are trying to hire them to solve, and you get "I'd conduct a study..." when we have 6 months to market and your study would take a year, and probably not provide definitive results. It's just a different mind set. I can't afford to bring you into a senior role and wait while you learn to be an engineer, while you learn to code at a higher level than 'University code' (a disparaging quote about the quality of the code Sergy and Larry brought to Google) and so on. We have a real, hard problem, and need an extremely focused, skilled, multidimensional person to perform it. I've yet to come across a PhD that made me think they could do it.

"I can learn to do that". Well, sure. Anybody can, it's just that so few do. Only a small handful of people actually produce at a high level in the ways I'm talking about. I don't want to bet on you being one of the few.

leeny• 13 years ago

I'd love more info about what happened during the interview process at each of the 20 jobs the author applied for.

I can definitely imagine a situation (and being a recruiter, have seen situations) where a PhD will keep you from getting your foot in the door. There can be concerns about the ability to actually write code, the ability to be practical, to be OK with working with unclean data, the ability to get stuff out the door and have a hacker mentality, etc etc.

However, these concerns tend to arise BEFORE starting the interview process. Once your foot is in the door, unless there's a huge disconnect between the people doing the hiring and the people doing the filtering or unless the job description changes midstream, how you do in interviews is more important than your background.

tincholio• 13 years ago

There can be concerns about the ability to actually write code, the ability to be practical, to be OK with working with unclean data, the ability to get stuff out the door and have a hacker mentality, etc etc.

These all seem to be concerns of someone who does not what doing a PhD entails, really.

phamilton2• 13 years ago

I would like to see someone like this remove their PhD from their resume and see if the conversation changes at all.

jurassic• 13 years ago

The 5 year gap in your resume is not easily concealed.

lvs• 13 years ago

It's a great observation, but I think the cause runs a bit deeper than the author attempts in this short piece. The issue is that academia has grown a lot over the past several decades [1]. Federal funding has approximately doubled in the past two decades, and the annual number of PhDs has increased by ~50% [2]. At the same time, the number of tenure track faculty positions in the US has nearly halved [3].

So you have a situation in which we're training a lot more PhDs, so mean research group size is growing dramatically, but we're offering fewer of the sort of academic jobs that can allow them to excel in their trained discipline. As these folks then leave academia, they're very often leaving for jobs outside their field. This is a really unfortunate loss of the incredible taxpayer investment in their education that we should all be supporting, not discouraging.

[1] http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2014/fedperf14p.jpg

[2] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf10308/tab3.gif

[3] (embarassing wiki link, since labor statistics are a nightmare to sort though) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic)#From_1972_to_...

pwnguin2• 13 years ago

The PhD in question though is Computer Science, who's faculty ranks have (probably) not followed the same path you're charting for academia as a whole.

ssivark3• 13 years ago

"It was like being a chameleon and trying to get jobs where you had to be red, blue, or black. Yes, you’re capable of becoming any of those colors, but companies would rather hire animals that already were those specific colors."

"I eventually realized that, like many Ph.D.’s in many other fields, I had fallen into the Ph.D.-industry gap—i.e., the gap between highly specialized Ph.D. training and corporate-world expectations..."

There seems to be a dissonance in these two statements. If the former is true (based on description of his experiences) then companies would rather have specialized people to fit into slots (red/blue/black) than have a generalist (chameleon) who could grow to match nuanced needs. It seems like the problem was that he was not specialized enough in the very narrow skill they were looking for. If that's the case, then it goes against the commonly held opinion expressed in the 2nd excerpt.

sliverstorm8• 13 years ago

You could interpret it as saying he is highly specialized in a color industry isn't interested in, so his remaining marketable skill is his chameleon nature, which is not valued as much as he thought it would be.

ssivark3• 13 years ago

Irrespective of whether or not he was highly specialized in some aspect, he had demonstrated a much broader potential to learn and adapt; more than the specialized people they would otherwise be hiring.

So it seems like the real reason he wasn't hired was: 1. They might have to pay him more, for his potential (as illustrated by his degree) than they needed to pay some other fellow they could hire. 2. The HR management doesn't really know what to do with smart broadly skilled people. They have well-defined slots for cogs, but generalists are tougher to manage... you can't just shove them into a predefined slot.

To me, al it proves is that the industry is not ready/willing to hire a possible generalists (who also happened to have proven that they can learn something and be good at it). The cognitive dissonance making them think that he was "highly specialized" might also have been a possible contributor.

benihana• 13 years ago

The analogy about the Porsche is really telling. This guy isn't a Porsche. This guys is a Kia that costs as much as a Porsche and so therefore is convinced it's a Porsche. A Porsche doesn't need to tell you how fast it can go, how well it's engineered, how beautiful it is. A Porsche can speak for itself. A Kia can't - it needs to be proven, and the only way it'll get a chance to prove itself is if it's cheap and the risk of it sucking is mitigated. John Carmack is a Porsche. Donald Knuth is a Porsche. This guy is not.

joelgrus2• 13 years ago

This. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone with this attitude has trouble getting job offers.

auggierose2• 13 years ago

Lol. I bet you 1000 to 1 that you don't have a PhD.

batguano2• 13 years ago

That was my gut reaction too--but I'm not sure that it's a fair one. It may very well be true; but it's too harsh to say he's incompetent just because he found trouble finding the right job. Sadly, even the tech world isn't as much of a meritocracy as we might like.

I found his story valuable, and even if it is just anecdotal, it's a useful anecdote. He deserves credit for sharing it, because it certainly doesn't help your career to have an "I wasn't wanted" stigma attached to it.

Don't forget that the article is part of a blog about PhD's placement experiences--it's not just idle carping. Reading the authors responses to the comments, he sounds like a stand-up guy.

tosseraccount• 13 years ago

Take your Ph.D off your resume.

Real world software production needs little "computer science" expertise. There's too many Ph.D.s that take a research angle on projects. The goal is to design/implement/test/ship/support/improve and make money.

Best programmer I ever met didn't graduate high school.

Supply and demand determine wages. Ph.D. does not entitle to more pay. The industry simply does not rely on credentials like, say , the medical industry which does require an M.D. for the best paying "line" jobs.

mapcar• 13 years ago

But then how do you cover a five-year gap on your resume?

madiator• 13 years ago

Yup, don't take this advice blindly. You should put the PhD and probably cut down on listing all publications, and focus more projects/internships..

Dewie• 13 years ago

I don’t believe that “top” graduates are entitled to jobs, or that going to a “top” university makes you “better” than anyone else, or that I “deserved” an easier job search.

Well... apparently you do.

dajohnson89• 13 years ago

The author lost me here: "Despite having programmed computers since age 8, I was rejected from about 20 programming jobs."

This reeks of entitlement and, well, whining. When I first entered the SofEng job market after undergrad, I stopped counting rejections once the number passed 30. It took another 6 weeks after that, and the rejection count must have pushed 100.

Should I write a navel-gazing blog post too?

anmalhot• 13 years ago

I agree with the fact that rejections should not be counted solely as an end result because many a times the reason may just not be a technical one. You've got to be a fit and have a strong synergy with the team.

Xcelerate• 13 years ago

Wow, a lot of harsh criticism for Ph.D's on here! I can't speak much for a graduate degree in computer science (I don't know anything about it), but at least in my field - chemical engineering - there are many jobs that absolutely require a Ph.D. When I was an undergrad, I was dismayed by the number of "Ph.D. required" comments I saw on Intel's job listings for anything involving original processor design (only a BS was necessary for being a fab engineer).

A BS in chemical engineering basically qualifies you to be a process engineer. Sure, you can get a R&D job, but it's going to be a lot harder than if you have Ph.D. And there's plenty of research jobs out there; it's basically the impetus for a company's success over its competition (again, the science-y industries). There's certain tasks I would not consider hiring anyone for unless they either had a Ph.D. or had somehow independently demonstrated the capability for novel, unique research and problem solving skills.

I know the article was about CS, but the title was "Ph.D. - Industry Gap" and there's many fields out there where I feel like a Ph.D. is almost essential for particular jobs in those fields.

wissler2• 13 years ago

I think CS as a field has theoretical problems at its foundations that chemical engineering doesn't have. This makes a PhD in CS worth less to business than it otherwise would be.

Obviously I don't expect this to be a wildly popular sentiment...

seanmcdirmid6• 13 years ago

I have a phd in computer science that doesn't involve much theory. Pure theoreticians exist, but they are quite rare. If your company doesn't have hard problems to solve, it doesn't need phds.

bbgm• 13 years ago

At my little biotech/bioinformatics startup (this was 13 years ago), pretty much everyone had a PhD. What made us somewhat different was that only a few of us had done any postdoctoral work.

_delirium• 13 years ago

There are some areas of CS that are more along those lines. They're less common in the industries represented on HN, though.

One example that comes to mind is graphics: places like Pixar and ILM heavily hire PhDs for R&D work, developing rendering algorithms and infrastructure and the like. They do also hire non-PhDs, but without some equivalent research track record (e.g. a SIGGRAPH paper or two), usually not for R&D jobs.

I hadn't actually counted before, but if you go to http://graphics.pixar.com/research/people.html and look at the bios, 9 out of the 11 have a PhD, and there are more outside the formal research division.

elteto2• 13 years ago

There's a lot of (understandable given the user base) bias in HN towards startups and the software industry, where you don't exactly need a PhD to crank out the next social media app or whatever. Therefore people will emit opinions based on their experiences, which might explain the negativity that you perceive. However, as you point out, in pretty much any other field of engineering, PhD hires are a most if you are pushing the frontier and producing genuine research.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

By and large, comparing chemical engineering to software development is misguided. Software development isn't an engineering field, i.e. the application of a refined theoretical framework to a concrete problem. It's more like carpentry. There's a few basic theoretical principles, but by and large it's just building things. You can spend a lifetime becoming an expert carpenter, and that can be very valuable, but nobody gets a PhD in carpentry because by and large there's not much there that's theoretically interesting.

There are many areas that are theoretically rigorous, of course. Machine-learning/AI, crypto/security, graphics, audio, video, etc, and unsurprisingly a PhD is quite valuable for programmers in those fields.

eriksank4• 13 years ago

Computer Science has a solid axiomatic foundation in the lambda calculus. Specific areas have their own foundational framework. For example, the relational algebra is an algebraic structure solidly vested in the Zermelo-Fraenckel set theory. So, in terms of math and science there are very solid theoretical principles. Computer Science is fundamentally and undisputedly a branch of mathematics. The fact that it can be practically applied, and very well so, does not detract from its roots and origin. This may sound hard for other academic disciplines, but it is not because it is also useful that it is no longer science.

tsotha3• 13 years ago

Where I work an advanced CS degree is a strike against you. What we've found over the years is people with advanced CS degrees just aren't very productive when it comes to actually producing code.

They tend to want to rewrite things that work but aren't very elegant, or they become despondent over the language we're using and the reluctance of management to allow them to use Haskell for their piece of our Java project.

randartie• 13 years ago

Your comment seems to go against what other people have said is wrong with Ph.Ds. Other people are saying that researchers tend to write code that just works at a bare minimum, but you're stating that they tend to like to rewrite code so that it becomes better code. I think this whole thread might be giving ph.ds a bad rap. disclaimer, i'm not a ph.d.

tsotha3• 13 years ago

Other people are saying that researchers tend to write code that just works at a bare minimum...

That isn't specific to people with PhDs. Every programmer without job experience does that. Back when I worked on a Unix/C application for a company that hired new grads it was common to have code checked in without any error checking at all.

If the person is reasonably intelligent (and everyone who finishes a PhD is pretty intelligent) it takes all of about two weeks to break them of the homework coding style.

selimthegrim6• 13 years ago

Yeah, you know what? Managers like you are the reason that when I screen Java candidates and ask them to clean up copy and paste reduplication in code with an anonymous inner class, I get blank stares. From every single one I interview.

tsotha3• 13 years ago

So you spend the interview trying to confuse them with meaningless jargon which you're using to describe a task programmers do every day? Really?

Let me guess... you don't have a high rate of acceptance when you extend offers.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

Doesn't sound like he had much of a portfolio of launched apps. Just one 47k lines project is the only one he was specific about. The rest was about education that doesn't matter much.

If he really wants a programming job he should get his hands dirty and publish some apps, either alone or meeting up with tech meetup or study group. A PhD is not studying how to code, you just may code a little as a by product. Then he could talk about launching and features and getting code done day after day instead of talking incessantly about education, and he'd land the job.

Kind of strange he wasn't able to place due to the old boys network, though. I know tons of people running startups who simply check their alma mater first and foremost when hiring. Especially schools like his.

eli_gottlieb7• 13 years ago

If he really wants a programming job he should get his hands dirty and publish some apps, either alone or meeting up with tech meetup or study group.

Speaking from the grad-school/research perspective: we never think of that. Why? Because our entire training is in thinking about research-hard problems. From our perspective, anything you can get together in a Hackathon and crank out an "app" for is trivial and beneath consideration for someone proposing to do serious work.

And yes, I do realize exactly how this sounds. The best I can say in our defense is that we still face all the normal design, development, testing/QA, and marketing issues after we've solved a research problem.

freyr• 13 years ago

I hate to cast doubt on the guy, but he seems to have based the entire article on his own personal experience. So we have one side of the story from the most partial participant. Despite claiming to have approached the problem scientifically, he's only considered a sample size of one. If he's writing an article about this perceived societal issue, why not broaden the scope beyond himself? What percentage of CS PhD's are unable to find employment? What about Stanford CS Ph.D.s?

Further, I encountered a fairly high proportion of people in grad school who had, for one reason or another, difficult personalities (heck, this probably applies to myself). How do we know he isn't bombing the interviews for such a reason? We don't.

That said, it sounds like his graduate work was performed in an area that's irrelevant to industry. Despite acknowledging this, it sounds like he believes that this work alone (and the academic reward it received) should qualify him to work. He needs to realize that many employers don't think this way. They don't make the leap "He did X, so certainly he can do Y for us". That's just the way it is, and the sooner he realizes that and refocuses his attention towards the employers needs, (rather than his prior solution to an unrelated need), the better off he'll be.

jimt67• 13 years ago

Seconded. This is anecdotal evidence. If the poster is making it to interview I would be willing to wager that the interview itself is leading to the lack of success rather than the degree. In other words, if there was an inherent bias against doctorates then why would a company waste additional resources in an interview?

muneeb2• 13 years ago

I'd be surprised if someone from http://csl.stanford.edu wrote that article. My point is that it matters a lot what area you did your PhD in and not just that you finished a PhD in CS. If your area was Machine Learning and you can't get a data scientist job then you obviously messed up. If your area was networks/systems and you can't get a programming job then you obviously messed up! Those cases are very clear (and rarely ever happen). But you can't take a specific case of working in an area outside of core systems or ML and then try to generalize it as the "PhD -- industry gap". CS is an exception, and not an example, of the PhD--industry gap. Try talking to grad students outside of CS and you'll see how envious they are of CS PhDs finding industry jobs.

pwnguin2• 13 years ago

He worked in [biosimulation](https://simtk.org/users/ctj). A bio [here] claims he worked on 3D slicer, but I don't see any (such contribution)[https://github.com/Slicer/Slicer/graphs/contributors].

muneeb2• 13 years ago

I guess what I was trying to say earlier was that a "PhD in CS from Stanford" is not a universal thing that can then be used to see how desirable (or not desirable) it is in the industry job market. It matter a lot what area you worked on. For example, both systems/networking and AI/ML are in high demand right now and it's very hard to argue against that (which is not clear from the article at all).

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

This guy's getting shredded-- and unfairly so-- here, and Porsche is the wrong metaphor (he's more like a high-end supercomputer; almost no one has any use for more than an iPad these days). However, he's dead right about one thing, and it will affect everyone here who is serious about programming.

As you get better, the jobs available to you get better, but the job searches get a lot harder.

PhD programs exacerbate the problem. You get better fast (faster than people do on typical early-20s grunt work) and by 27, you're already at that level of skill that starts to complicate job searches. (Again, jobs available are better; but 3-5 month searches are common.) In addition, you haven't learned the judgment-of-character skills that most people pick up in entry-level hell; whereas most people, by the time they get good enough that it starts to actually cost them job prospects, have learned those skills.

tezka2• 13 years ago

you and others are ignoring the fact that the guy has been rejected more than a dozen times at technical interviews. He has demonstrated an inability to pass what's the bare minimum: basic programming, algorithms and data structure. If someone with a PhD cannot re-master this material (which he/she has supposedly learned in undergrad) within few weeks of preparation, no matter how fancy the PhD research is, then that in itself is telling about his/her commitment, drive or competence. These claims sound like saying oh I am a best seller novelist yet having forgotten (and unwilling or unable to revisit) the alphabet. At the end of the day, there is no evidence that PhDs have a hard time getting interviews (the author got 20 or so), and if they really ace the interviews, heck even do reasonably well, they will have no problems getting hired. A PhD degree by itself will not get them hired, but it will not jeopardize their chance either, provided that they do well in the interview.

kenster07• 13 years ago

Say you have person A and person B who have equal raw ability. Person A spends 6 years gaining domain-specific knowledge for his job through real work experience, and person B pursues a PhD in a somewhat related field. Which person do you think will command a higher salary in the job market?

It doesn't seem to be an efficient usage of time to pursue a PhD for the express purpose of earning a higher salary upon graduation.

morgante4• 13 years ago

The experience factor is huge here, and should be pinpointed. Being able to work in a non-academic environment is incredibly important, because honestly the pace and quality of technical work done in academic settings just isn't comparable.

"Companies hesitated to hire a Ph.D. with no industry experience"

That, for me, would be the #1 red flag. How does one even go through getting a PhD without getting any industrial experience? Not a single internship, even as an undergraduate?

This tells me that either the PhD literally can't code (and hence nobody even wanted them as an intern) or despises industry so much that they never wanted an internship (and hence I'd be pretty worried about how much they'd be committed to the new job).

InAnEmergency• 13 years ago

Alternatively, they had full funding (even during the summer), focused on research and graduating (so it didn't take them 10 years), and didn't realize they needed to get an internship to be competitive once they graduated.

morgante4• 13 years ago

Sure, I don't doubt that's what they did. But that's not a counterargument to my point, which is that they chose to not once in (I'm guessing) 6+ years set foot outside academia.

Even given unlimited research funding, to not once try working in industry (even during undergrad) betrays a worrying single-mindedness which I'd want to avoid in any technical hire. If all you do is proceed down one path, without ever trying anything else or being a little creative, I probably don't want you on my team.

graycat5• 13 years ago

There is an easier answer, a much, much, much easier and better answer: Nearly all of business and industry are still organized as a hierarchy much like in the early factories of Henry Ford where the supervisor is supposed to know more and the subordinate is supposed to know less and to add muscle to the work of the supervisor.

If a supervisor has a subordinate that knows more, then the subordinate can challenge and compete with the supervisor on technical grounds, look more qualified than the supervisor, and threaten the supervisor's job. Academics has solutions to this problem: An assistant professor can win a Nobel prize without damage to the career of the department chair. But industry has no solution.

More generally, a Ph.D. must report to another Ph.D. or to the CEO of the company. Put this fact into the connected, directed, acyclic graph of the hierarchy of the organization chart and see the consequences.

In particular, industry just will not, Not, NOT evaluate qualifications in a reasonable way. Instead, they tend to have a list of 'skills' and want to check them off -- Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Django, JSON, C++, Mongo, SQL Server, etc. If you can code heap sort or an AVL tree on a white board, okay.

This whole situation is part of a larger one: Basically the US economy for 'careers' as hired 'employees' is nearly dead. So, GE, GM, AT&T, etc. are no longer offering 'career paths'. Actually, a career needs to last about 40 years which means that, really, only rarely since the start of the Industrial Revolution did large, US corporations offer 'careers'.

The flip side of this situation is good news: The role of a good Ph.D. with some interest in business should be a company founder, get some 'traction', then take a walk down Sand Hill Road and collect some Series A checks. Use the Ph.D. and/or the corresponding learning/talent for the crucial, core 'secret sauce' of the business. Then type in the software and get the 'traction'. No one on Sand Hill Road will question just what the heck your qualifications were for typing in the software.

Then f'get about a 'job'. That is, if you want a job, then create one for yourself. An advantage here is that, just as a solid consequence of just what you have seen, the big organizations will be essentially helpless at doing work that duplicates or equals yours.

One short term option is to be a contract employee. That is, some company needs some SQL stored procedures or some such written, so you write them.

One 'academic' solution may be to get a job in a B-school that wants to have a good course or course sequence in 'information technology'. There your qualifications are fine.

The 'gap' is all on the side of industry, and it can be taken advantage of.

You can tell the EE department at Stanford that a EE Ph.D. can easily want to swap their degree for an electrician's license.

Why? Because the Ph.D. needs a large organization which is in international competition, and an electrician with a license has a geographical barrier to entry, can work in nearly any town of the US, can't be fired, and can make money enough to buy a house. For the EE Ph.D. in a large corporation, he can be fired after a few years (because he didn't get promoted into management -- only a small fraction of new hires do) and find that the guy he knew in high school mowing grass now has eight trucks and 20 employees and is doing better than the Ph.D. is.

tomrod2• 13 years ago

I'm worried that I'm going to follow this guys footsteps. I'm an academic economist with a penchant for data science (not useful really in consulting or smaller research groups). We'll see how this next year goes -- I might be writing a similar blog post.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

This is what I find ridiculous about the software industry. On one hand, everything is highly derivative. Python, Ruby, C#, whatever, is just a warmed over syntactic variation of the same basic technologies that have been in existence since the early 1970's. On the other hand, the industry is hyper-focused on finding people with exactly the experience in the particular warmed over rehash that happens to be the blue plate special this week.

igravious• 13 years ago

It is a bit ridiculous, isn't it? But it's a curious and interesting state of affairs also.

marincounty• 13 years ago

I think the business world has realized many professions don't need the Ph.D. 'Give me a hungry kid who's willing to learn' --Gekko That's one of the lines that really resonated. Actually, that movie, along with Platoon really captured the duality of man--at least for me. Off subject, but I'm off today.

bigd• 13 years ago

Most of the time if you do not get a job is because no one wants to work with you. In my opinion, PhD to PhD, is that you have to learn to be modest and do not sound like an overconfident asshole. you are not an used car to sell. Academia is famous for making people who loves the smells of their own farts. Be humble, be modest, demonstrate that you are good, and you'll get a job.

MichaelMoser123• 13 years ago

Depends on what type of job one is looking for; it depends upon the niche.

- i think that as an algorithm expert one will find places that do value a Ph.D

- as developer/coder you will have to consider that your prospective manager will feel discomfort at managing you (regardless of the applicants coding skills); A manager needs somebody who gets the job done, he does not need somebody smarter/more educated than his own person.

tildedave• 13 years ago

A big piece I found missing missing from the original article is the question of engagement: how do companies know that you're going to like the job? The kind of person who enjoys an academic career may not enjoy a software development career because the activities and values involved are rather different.

I moved from academics (freshly graduated computer science PhD) into software development four years ago and when I did I had to answer a lot of questions about why I wanted to make the move.

My experience is of course not universal but I think that career trajectory is a big part of senior interviews once it's been established that you can do the job. It's a broader issue than just academics vs industry. No matter what field you're in, you have to sell you your career transitions as 'make sensing' to the jobs you're applying to. Job searching from the company side is more complicated than accumulating experience and rewards (the Porsche in the original article) to end up being granted a job.

I wrote up some longer thoughts on this: http://www.davehking.com/2013/09/22/jumping-from-academics-i...

dimitar• 13 years ago

* Are you truly focused on the job at hand or are you focused on proving your credentials?

The difference is subtle, but its a trap that many highly qualified people fall into. I'm under the impression that the author spent a lot of time talking about his PHD and what he knows rather than the problems at hand.

* Are you sure you are not overvaluing yourself? Jobs are in short supply, PHD looks like risk.

And the example with the Ferrari was awful - if the luxurious car was on sale with a marginally lower price it would sell. Faster, the lower the price.

mathattack• 13 years ago

It is very hard for me to have sympathy for someone who spent 5+ years at a great school, likely funded, in a useful discipline that struggles to get a job.

I would like to hear from academic departments on why they said no the academic superstar from Stanford. I would like to hear from IBM and Microsoft on why they couldn't use him. That's what's missing.

Maybe it's entitlement? Some of that creeps into the article. Maybe it's a personality that just isn't agreeable? Some of that is in the article too.

dev1n• 13 years ago

There was an article on HN recently about how the STEM job-gap is a myth. In the article the author discusses how if there were in fact a job shortage in STEM careers, STEM wages would be driven up. Chand Johnson's article seems to go right up this alley. The perceived "STEM shortage" is really just a way to drive wages down in the technology center so that corporations can reap the rewards.

sidww2• 13 years ago

It seems to me that their must be more to this situation -- I'm doing a PhD in CS and I don't know of a single PhD I knew in undergrad (top 20 program) or grad (top tier program) who wasn't able to find a job right after graduation -- and by that I mean a job that payed more than what an undergrad straight out of college would get (though it may not involve any research). This was irrespective of the subfield in which the PhD in CS was.

It sounds very weird that someone coming from a Stanford CS PhD -- a top tier PhD program in the heart of the Silicon Valley would not be able to find a job quickly...

At any rate, whatever the circumstances, from anecdotal experience, such a case is almost unheard of for a PhD in CS coming from a good program.

websitescenes• 13 years ago

Paying for knowledge that is freely available will always be kinda silly in my opinion. This is how I see school in general and why I dropped out and never looked back. School is great for some but very detrimental for others. If your field requires a certification then you need school, if not, you're probably wasting your time. Try building something or making your own company.

eliben• 13 years ago

Google grabs able PhDs like hot cookies. Is this another "I failed my programming interviews, hence all programming interviews are bad!" rants, thinly disguised behind an attention-grabbing headline?

tezka2• 13 years ago

The bar for passing technical interviews is pretty low. All you need to do is to get reasonably competent in one or two mainstream programming languages (I emphasize reasonably, you definitely don't need expert knowledge), say Java or C++. This shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks of focused effort if you already have some degree in CS and know programming. At the same time you have to refresh your memory about data structures and algorithms. Dust off your favorite algorithm book, and go through sorting, searching, binary trees, hashing, elementary graph algorithms and dynamic programming. If you have taken a relevant course before and paid attention to it (you were told this was going to be your most important CS course ever, no?), it shouldn't take more than a day or two to remember this stuff (again assuming that your undergrad CS degree was not a waste of time). Then you need to solve a few exercises to practice, mostly to become confident in yourself. Topcoder, dozens of online sample questions would do. You won't need full coverage of every possibility, but to assure yourself that your brain still ticks and backed by your knowledge you can approach the problem presented to you at the interview. In total you need a week and a half or two weeks to get to top shape to pass interview at the likes of facebook, google, amazon et al.

The Ph.D.-Industry Gap

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