

Yes, We Have a Ph.D. Glut. - barry-cotter
http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2010/02/yes_we_have_a_phd_glut.php?utm_source=selectfeed&utm_medium=rss

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levesque
This article worded pretty nicely my doubts and fears. At first I wanted to do
a PhD (computer engineering) but I would probably have to leave my
city/country (Quebec/Canada, small city ~ 600K ppl) to find a job as a
teacher/researcher. I'd close myself many doors by doing a PhD. What for ?

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goodness
Are you saying that having a PhD will overqualify you for some positions? I
have occasionally heard this claim, but I have found it to be pretty much
utterly false. Almost everyone wants the most qualified employees they can
get. I think this is becoming even more true as folks have seen Google's
success in hiring PhDs.

When a hiring manager specifically excludes overqualified people, this is a
pretty big red flag to me. Managers usually only say this when they have a
very tedious or low paying job that they think a PhD-type will quickly abandon
for something better. I wouldn't exactly call this a "closed door", I'd say
it's more of a sign that there are lots of better opportunities for qualified
people. If these other opportunities went away, then the tedious jobs would
start raising their qualifications too.

PhDs also have many other "open doors" that other people just don't have. All
those teaching and research jobs you mention are available to them.

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timr
_"Almost everyone wants the most qualified employees they can get. I think
this is becoming even more true as folks have seen Google's success in hiring
PhDs."_

One can only hope (but I doubt it). Google doesn't hire just _any_ Ph.D. --
they hire the best people who have CS experience, and that's only a tiny
sliver of the total Ph.D. pool.

That said, I've experienced the downside of the degree, particularly when
interacting with tech people. Lots of geeks get their dander up when they find
out you have a doctorate, and start hammering on you harder, as if to prove
something to themselves. I've also had people explicitly question my interest
in jobs, to my face. It's definitely a real phenomenon, and I can understand
why people might want to remove it from their resume. (If only it were easy to
explain that 5+ year gap in employment history....)

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yummyfajitas
_Lots of geeks get their dander up when they find out you have a doctorate,
and start hammering on you harder, as if to prove something to themselves.
I've also had people explicitly question my interest in jobs, to my face._

I've had this happen as well, but once you overcome these obstacles, you are
at an advantage.

On interviews, I get that initial skepticism that I'm too "pie in the sky".
That vanishes after a coding test. As for my interest in jobs, I've been asked
that, but it's always been a fair question (in fact, I've never been asked
that about a job I really wanted).

~~~
timr
I haven't had the degree long enough to know one way or the other if it's a
net benefit. It's possible that it really helps as you get further along in
your career. And truthfully, the downside hasn't been so bad that I've thought
about hiding it on a resume (in CS -- I definitely thought about it while
hunting for a job in biotech, for various perverse reasons).

I'm just saying that I've personally experienced the downside, so I know it's
not a made-up phenomenon.

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mattheww
Somebody posted the original article here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151369>

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lallysingh
This is a little off -- it's presuming that you only get a PhD to teach.

I'm on mine to do a better job in industry. And I'm not alone where I work,
not by a long shot.

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timr
Depends on the industry. If you're getting a PhD in biotech, good industry
jobs are only slightly less difficult to land than tenure-track positions. For
the big names (Genentech, Amgen, etc.), getting a scientist position is just
as hard, if not harder.

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pw0ncakes
Why is it that people who are bright and want to do actual work have it
astronomically harder than the bullshitting rainmakers and mediocrities who
get to run the economy?

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mnemonicsloth
1\. Because the rainmakers handle the money.

2\. Because the scientists are taking little risk compared to the founders and
investors who build the institutions that support their research.

3\. Because humans are hard-wired to respect rainmaking and distrust science.
Social behavior has been humanity's evolutionary killer app for the last 1500
centuries. Science has existed for maybe 5.

~~~
pw0ncakes
1\. Upsetting, but true. One major virtue of many ancient societies is that
they had social checks and balances that put those with talent and
intelligence in positions of higher status and more power than those who
happened to incidentally have the money. Ours fails in that regard.

2\. The founders are not mediocrities. The people who come in later and use
social manipulation to control resources they didn't create are the
mediocrities.

3\. Interesting and reasonable point.

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m0th87
But how much does the Ph.D. glut argument apply to computer science? I've
never found a solid answer, and that information is especially relevant to my
future career path (and I'm sure many others on HN)

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neilc
I'm biased (currently a PhD student), but I think your employment prospects
are pretty good with a CS PhD, especially if it is (a) from a good school (b)
in something practical (a PhD in theory might still let you get a job at
somewhere like Microsoft Research, but it depends on what kind of theory; a
theory PhD would be less helpful for most startups).

With a CS PhD, you have a lot of options: academia, industrial research
(Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and so on), working for or founding a
startup, etc. Happily, many CS graduate schools and professors explicitly
recognize that many grad students don't intend to pursue a career in academia,
which I think is less the case in other academic fields.

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robryan
You can also see it conceivably helping with a start up idea that pushes the
boundaries, something that requires you to do years of research to pull off
well is probably going to be a bigger gap in the start up market that
something that just does something in a crowded market slightly better and
more efficiently.

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rortian
This was a horribly written post that was not even spell checked. The bulk of
it quoted two articles. If this was an interesting topic that you would like
to discuss, please post the link to one of the original articles. Feel free to
HT the post and name the other article in the comments.

~~~
noonespecial
Yeah, I got to, _"Before everyone freaks out (ZOMG!! YOU EATED ALL TEH
GRANTZ!!)"_ before I realized I was reading a cartoon strip.

