
The Ph.D.-Industry Gap - unignorant
https://chronicle.com/blogs/phd/2013/09/19/the-ph-d-industry-gap/
======
xianshou
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.

~~~
msutherl
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.

~~~
batguano
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."

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I will take a pay cut to do the research i want to do, and I would do for free
otherwise.

------
Xcelerate
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.

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
eriksank
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.

~~~
rayiner
I didn't say computer science wasn't scientific, I said software engineering
isn't an application of scientific principles. Software engineering mostly
isn't a practical application of computer science.

To use the example posed above: you cannot be designing chemical processes
without a solid grasp of the theory. You cannot do your day to day job without
applying the theoretical concepts of the field to daily problems. That's what
makes a PhD valuable in that field.

In contrast, many software engineers have no idea about lambda calculus, set
theory, type theory, etc. You can build a lot of software with just the
crudest theoretical understanding that you can pick up from hacking on
software. That's why I likened it to carpentry. A carpenter will have a crude
theoretical understanding about wood, it's grain patterns and how it absorbs
stains, etc, but he doesn't need a solid foundation in the science to
effectively do his job.

------
jblow
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!

~~~
michaelochurch
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.

~~~
selimthegrim
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](http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-
memoir.htm)

------
lvs
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](http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2014/fedperf14p.jpg)

[2]
[http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf10308/tab3.gif](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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_\(academic\)#From_1972_to_the_present)

~~~
pwnguin
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.

------
dkhenry
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_gottlieb
_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.

~~~
dkhenry
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.

------
hapless
"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.

~~~
javert
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
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.

~~~
javert
Right, which makes my point that they are not handing out PhDs for the sake of
their salary. (Settings aside pre-tenure people.)

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

------
freyr
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
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?

------
yetanotherphd
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.

------
georgemcbay
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.

~~~
dccoolgai
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?

~~~
awakeasleep
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.

~~~
dccoolgai
Well the company website said "don't wear a suit"... but I feel like kind of
an a-hole going to an interview and not wearing a suit...I always thought that
"don't wear a suit" stuff was just there to trip up super-awkward devs...the
interview went well - I make it a point not to act or communicate like a guy
in a suit, so maybe that helps...

------
msutherl
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.

~~~
throwaway1979
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.

------
Swizec
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.

~~~
PaulHoule
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.

------
ivan_ah
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.

~~~
msutherl
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_ah
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.

------
foobarian
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.

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

~~~
madiator
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..

------
tsotha
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
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.

~~~
tsotha
> 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.

------
dajohnson89
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
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.

------
RogerL
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.

------
bigd
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.

------
asafira
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.

~~~
Lewisham
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?

~~~
asafira
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?

~~~
Lewisham
There are very few people who actually work under Google Research, everyone
else is a software engineer (including everyone who worked on my research
paper with me [1]). The trick is to realize that there are many product teams
for which what you'll be doing are researchy style jobs. These are usually
things where you're working on the backend (Compute Platform, Search, Google
X) rather than the frontend (Javascript UI stuff). While the job description
is software engineer, for those reasearchy jobs, you're doing work that's very
similar to what you might be trying at the university lab. Except with a lot
more data, and a lot more computing power behind you.

Matt Welsh has written a number of times about his job change from Harvard
Prof to Google, and he's a software engineer by title AFAIK, but he's clearly
doing research work.

[1]
[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41145.html)

------
websitescenes
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.

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

~~~
PaulHoule
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.

------
muneeb
I'd be surprised if someone from
[http://csl.stanford.edu](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.

~~~
pwnguin
He worked in
[biosimulation]([https://simtk.org/users/ctj](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](https://github.com/Slicer/Slicer/graphs/contributors)].

~~~
muneeb
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).

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

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

------
sidww2
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.

------
morgante
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
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.

~~~
morgante
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.

------
tezka
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.

------
tildedave
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...](http://www.davehking.com/2013/09/22/jumping-from-academics-
into-industry.html)

------
kenster07
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.

------
ssivark
"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.

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
ssivark
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
I would bet generalists are going to be selected against. It's good to have a
few generalists to handle the unexpected and such, but at least to me it seems
you'd wind up paying the generalist more for the same work, so you would seek
to use specialists wherever possible.

~~~
ssivark
That might well be the case, but then, the claim that PhDs are not hired
because they're "too specialized" is duplicitous.

~~~
sliverstorm
"Too specialized" usually seems to translate roughly to "Specialized in things
we don't care about"

------
marincounty
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.

------
leeny
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
> 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.

------
lnanek2
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_gottlieb
_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._

------
dimitar
* 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
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.

------
wtvanhest
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.

------
dev1n
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.

------
MichaelMoser123
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.

------
kirk21
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](https://bohr.typeform.com/to/PPzzY8)

------
tomrod
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.

------
eliben
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?

------
graycat
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.

------
michaelochurch
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.

~~~
tezka
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.

------
benihana
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.

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

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

~~~
joelgrus
I dropped out of my PhD program when I realized that

1\. I didn't want to be an academic, and 2\. Having a PhD wasn't going to help
me get a non-academic job, and 3\. Grad school kind of sucks.

But, as a result, I have a lot of friends who finished their PhDs, and the
idea that they are metaphorically "Porsches" compared to the many talented
non-PhD developers and data scientists I've worked with is laughable.

------
Dewie
> 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.

