
What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry? - gandalfgeek
http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/29296581613/what-is-life-like-for-phds-in-computer-science-who-go
======
justin_vanw
I can sum up this article:

A PhD is roughly the same as a Masters for getting a job, except that you get
paid a bit more if it's a big company with an HR department. You haven't
really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be
paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you
do at 30. Well, you might be able to do well, or maybe not, some PhD's are
great and some are suck, and the same is true for people without degrees. You
have to prove you are valuable. This is all going to make you very depressed
since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about,
instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia, but you
have to eat so you might as well get on with it.

Well, that's my summary :) (I'm a bit biased being a dropout)

~~~
pbiggar
Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're
not just biased, you're also completely misinformed.

> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are
> going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience
> more than you do at 30.

More likely, you've spent 3-6 years coding, learning to communicate, and work
well in a team.

> This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour
> weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing
> only what interests you in Academia.

Most recently hired academics on a tenure track work 80 hour weeks. You've got
to teach course, mentor research students, write grant proposals, and produce
research. If you don't, you're out the door.

Imagine I were to suggest that because you're a dropout, all you're good for
is saying "do you want fries with that?" That's about the level of what you've
done with your comment.

~~~
justin_vanw
Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM,
_7_ days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)???

This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only
a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If
you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and
wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion.

But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a
bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm
assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4
classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's
(at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year.

Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know
this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's
60 hours, yearly.

Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody
probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or
your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365,
which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours
per year.

Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else,
nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week)
on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume
that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to
just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything
else, so this will get rolled in as overhead.

So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all
but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most.

If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year
working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost
none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind.

Want fries with that?

Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time,
averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5
is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per
week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to
that.

~~~
liedra
Wow, your hours on preparing lectures, grant proposal writing, dealing with
students, etc. are all way underestimated. A solid grant proposal that is
likely to get funded (often in a super competitive field with maybe 8%
acceptance rate) can take well over 2 months of solid preparation. Of course
we don't actually get 2 months of solid preparation time, what with all the
other stuff we have to do. My workload as an early career academic is roughly
10% on a funded project, 20% "research", i.e. grant/paper writing, 5% on a
couple of committees I am on, and the rest teaching, with roughly half of that
supervisions of PhD/Masters students.

For my masters students that equates to about 6 hours of meetings and
reviewing their stuff over 3 months of their project. Most of my colleagues
and I burn through that in the first month. So what do we do for the other 2
months? Well it's not like we can shut up shop and say "welp, sorry, but
you've used all your allotted time" because that'd be terrible. So we continue
to give whatever amount of time we feel is necessary (within reason).

Anyway it's not as simple as you've broken it down to be. Things ebb and flow
over the year too, students need more mentoring at certain times of the year
than others. Grant proposals, conferences, special issues journals all have
deadlines and calls. My week is extremely varied and I'm still working on
juggling all the different hats and priorities I have. I have a full load
right now over summer even without teaching; when teaching starts up again
I'll have to do all the stuff I'm doing now (bar masters student supervision)
while doing roughly 25% of my allotted time teaching undergraduates.

Anyway, just another perspective.

~~~
larsberg
Your numbers are in line with what I see from my advisor.

The original also failed to break down paper writing. For a top-tier
conference, you're going to spend several weeks worth of full days working on
a paper, and you're probably going to do it twice per paper because, as they
say, even Simon Peyton-Jones has papers rejected occasionally. This time is on
top of work you already did to get your system working! (well, unless the
paper is the result, as in some areas of theory)

You really, really have to want to live it. I enjoy it, and as a PhD student I
don't mind spending all my waking hours that aren't devoted to my wife or a
little bit of exercise doing research. But just to be competitive, that's sort
of the baseline. I'm not sure, though, whether it's truly a demand of the job
or just the default because academic research attracts people who work like
that (I also worked like that when I was a developer at MSFT).

~~~
liedra
The thing is you can kinda coast if you want to. But in the UK at least you
have to churn out at least 4 high quality papers every 6 years to be included
in the "Research Excellence Framework", the assessment of the research quality
of the university. Although you don't _have_ to be included in the REF, it was
used as a weeding point for redundancies at one of my previous universities
(i.e. those who had been in the previous REF were exempt from being included
in the redundancy pool; everyone else had to reapply for their jobs). So it
does tend to hang over you, even if it's not a direct reason you might get
fired.

My university is an ex-polytechnic, so it focuses a lot on teaching as well.
You can quite easily get by just teaching - we have a few "just teachers",
though they tend to be the older employees. New fulltime employees are
expected to do a bit of everything, which is actually a lot better, IMO. If
teachers are doing research and contributing to their field, they're reading
current stuff and can incorporate that into their teaching. etc. etc. Lots of
good reasons for it to happen.

Interdisciplinarians are also rewarded - one of the reasons I got my job in a
tough environment (I do computer ethics) was because I had a strong background
in computer science vs. most comp ethicists who come from philosophy. So it
helps to be able to cover a few different things rather than just one very
niche specialty subject as well.

Ultimately though I love my job. It's highly flexible, stimulating, varied
work, I have great benefits, especially holidays, and the university is very
supportive of family life.

------
tensor
The only exception I take with this is the part about coding in an interview.
My complaints there are not specific to having a PhD though.

I understand the need for practical tests like these, but whiteboard coding is
not a good way to do it. People dont' typically program on white boards, they
do it alone with a compiler, reference manual, and the ability to test. Put
them in a room with a terminal and ask them to write a straight forward
program in 30 minutes. If you have to practice for the interview, what exactly
are you determining in the interview? Their ability to program? Or their
ability to practice interview tricks?

Immediately discounting a candidate because they are annoyed at your question
to whiteboard code also seems rash. Asking someone experienced to write the
"print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them. Especially
so if the candidate has a CS PhD and spent time grading students on more
complicated programs, or especially if their CV includes links to public
repositories containing thousands of lines of code they wrote. On the other
hand, asking a candidate to sketch a genuinely complicated algorithm on the
board is a reasonable question.

~~~
harryh
> Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse"
> algorithm will naturally insult them.

Why? It's a trivial question that any programmer should be able to answer
easily. An interview is a test. An interviewee should be happy if the test
starts so simply. It's a chance to warm up and get in the groove.

When you took tests in school were you insulted if the first question on the
page was too simple? No, you just answered it and were happy that you earned
your first points so easily.

~~~
tensor
The reason it is annoying for people who are experienced is that generally
they are looking for jobs where they get to work on difficult and interesting
problems. Being asked such a simple question might indicate that you are
interviewing for a position you won't want.

I'd personally be very tempted to answer the whiteboard question and
immediately explain that I'm not interested in a job that consists only of
writing trivial implementations and ask if they can give examples of real
problems they face which are non-trivial.

I have actually had one interviewee ask me such a question, although not in
response to a simple test or question of my own. This impressed me, although I
get the impression that most interviewers would not appreciate this in a
similar way to how they do not appreciate candidates that find their fizz-buzz
test annoying.

An interview is not a one way test. It is a two way test where the employer
can also fail.

~~~
pheon
Your answer implies you have a high ego as you consider the questions below
you and only interested in satisfying your own intellect/ego instead of
working in a team that gets shit done... read shipping products.

------
ltcoleman
In my experience, the degree has not been a factor at all when it comes to
value in industry. I have seen people that didn't have a degree produce more
maintainable code in a more productive manner. I also have seen coworkers with
bachelors outshine others with masters. I have climbed the corporate ladder at
my company and now with my power to influence hires, I rarely take the level
of degree in consideration.

Strangely, I have seen the attitude problem with new grads that possess a
masters or doctorate. I even had one tell my manager that he had a masters and
that meant he shouldn't ever have to do support work, and that he was smarter
than my manager. He was a fresh 23 year old grad and eventually left for a
larger company because he believed they would appreciate his masters. To add
salt to the wound, we found that almost every bit of his code either broke our
current projects or just flat out wasn't done correctly because he knew better
than everybody so there was no reason for him to ask a senior dev or even a BA
any questions about what he was doing.

All that to say, no matter the shop, no matter the degree, business is about
money, and we, as coders, produce value which is why our salaries are high. A
coder that is seen as valuable will always do better in there career and most
of the time his coworkers will see his value and respect him for that.

------
emmapersky
I have a Bachelors in Engineering (BEng) in Computing from Imperial College,
not a PhD, but I work in a group at Google where a significant percentage of
my peers do, but only know this because from time to time people mention the
kind of research they did because either it is relevant to what we are doing,
or comes up naturally in discussion.

I don't see any difference between what I do, and what others in my group do,
we are all in it together, but took different paths to get there. Our group is
more research focused (though we are Software Engineers) than many at Google,
and this has given me a great opportunity to learn from those with an (even)
more academic background.

TL;DR - I don't see any differences between PhDs and otherwise at Google, even
in 'researchy' teams.

------
mattdeboard
At my previous employer, we hired on a guy who was very close to earning his
PhD in CS from a midwestern university known for a prestigious engineering
program. I was excited because I thought that at the very least he would be
able to learn quickly and start tackling problems relatively quickly.

I was not disappointed. He was very assertive about not having his hand held
wrt figuring out problems, and was proactive in learning new things. When I
left to take another position, I felt comfortable that I was leaving the
codebase in good hands.

------
flatline
> there is no job in the modern tech industry that involves working alone.

Positions with aspects of management or sales typically involve actually
working with people, but this can be hard to achieve for many others. The high
tech field can be great for people who want to work in isolation, and fairly
lonely for people who do not. I have never worked in a place that effectively
implemented things like mentoring programs, for PhDs or anyone else. I am on
the East Coast, I suspect that this trend is less prevalent out West. You may
form bonds with people through a work environment, but the majority of your
daily (and weekly, and monthly) effort is a solitary endeavor. I have heard
this complaint from people working on PhD-level industrial research, to
coding, to website design. Getting in with a company that recognizes and
values real teamwork, assuming you are able to communicate effectively with
others, will make nearly any job a much more pleasant experience.

~~~
emmapersky
I think this is really interesting.

What "working alone" means is complex. For example, at Hashable, I was
effectively working alone, despite there being a wider notion of
collaboration. More over, when other people came in to contact with parts of
the code I was actively working on, instead of trying to work through those
components together (not neccsarily in a pairing way, but just a more general
collaboration), the standard was to make you change and not care about the
consequences.

In a code base without tests this was a nightmare.

If / when I am next looking for a job, really understanding how a company
collaborates is high up on my agenda of questions.

------
malloc47
One very good point this article brings to light is the emphasis academia
places on the tenure-track job as the end-all be-all of getting a Ph.D. I
can't even begin to count how many times I've heard how getting a
professorship is the only worthy job, and how there's no point to a Ph.D. if
you don't get such a job.

It's nearly to the point of brainwashing (a sweeping generalization, of
course, which likely varies greatly from department to department). As a soon-
to-be Ph.D. graduate, it's refreshing to know that industry is not only a
viable option, but doesn't have the same [superhuman][1] expectations.

[1]:
[http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap...](http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Mythpap.html)

~~~
javert
I'm 3 years into a PhD at a "second-tier" department (i.e. not MIT or
Stanford, but still a pretty good place), and I've never felt any pressure at
all to go into academia over industry. So there's one more data point for you.

Professors can make a huge "real-world contribution" via their students that
go into industry. So they _should_ be proud of those students and feel that
the effort of educating them was highly worthwhile.

~~~
malloc47
It's good to know there are still realistic perspectives in academia. To be
fair, the "anti-industry" attitude is probably adviser rather than department
dependent, as I have heard a few first-hand data points regarding advisers
that align much more with your experience than mine.

Given the 1/10 statistic, sooner or later professors will have to satisfy
themselves with student's "real-world" contributions, whether they like it or
not. I'm just worried how often I see real skill sets (e.g. proper software
engineering) being devalued among graduate students because it's not directly
relevant to a hypothetical future job as a professor. I feel lucky that I've
been able to make extra time to write "real" code from my dissertation work,
but it's rather unfortunate that this isn't always the norm.

------
azakai
Good points, as a PhD in the industry this all aligns pretty well with my
experience as well.

The only comment I have is regarding

>> Do people usually work alone, or with others?

> Again, the answer to this question does not depend on what degree you have.
> The simple truth is there is no job in the modern tech industry that
> involves working alone.

Agreed that this probably does not depend on what degree you have. But there
is a lot of variability in terms of how many people you work with. I worked
almost alone for a while, and in large teams at other times.

I suppose there is no job where you work 100% alone, with no contact at all
with anyone, ever, but I doubt that was the original question.

------
duked
I have a PhD and I worked for several by industry research labs. So when the
OP mentions " he went “oh well, if you must make me code…” That pretty much
made me go “no hire.” He clearly is being either dishonest or taking
shortcuts, PhD's want to have a job that is interesting if it's to piss code
all day I would have stopped at my Master degree. Pissing code, as much as
many would like to think is not exactly challenging if you have a PhD (I'm not
saying that having highly optimized, readable code isn't but having something
that works is not that hard) so if the whole interview process is centered
around how well you can write something in A/B/C/D language yes I understand
the interviewee.

One funny thing: "Most places will actually pair you up with a mentor who is
not your boss" this has to be a joke, I worked for HP-Labs and other big labs
never ever had a mentor, usually if you have a issue you are pretty much
welcome to discuss it with your colleague, have them review your proposed
solution but boy you are on your own when it comes to do implement it.

Again the OP has no clue clue of what he is talking and it's sad because his
research interests are security related: "You are much more likely to land an
interesting job at the coasts. West more than East." I can prove easily that
if you have a PhD in a security or somehow related (formal methods) you have
more chances to land a job on the east coast: DARPA,IARPA, MITRE, DoD all
these agencies are funding 80% of the security research of the country !
Easier if you are a citizen indeed, but I'm a foreigner on H1B and I still
work on a DARPA funded project ... One more joke: "Most industrial positions
will not care about your publications" seriously this guy is ridiculous or
just unable to think outside his google circle, most labs are indeed more than
interested in your publications because it means for them potential patent
application, more contacts in conferences and the end goal a better reputation
and more easier to build a consortium to respond to call for proposals or
BAA(<http://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?page=8>). But coming from someone
who has not many publication I understand, for information here is his
publication list [http://www.informatik.uni-
trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/h/...](http://www.informatik.uni-
trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/h/Haldar:Vivek.html)

Anyway I'll stop commenting the rest of his post, his post is not all bad but
it's based on his personal experience and he does a generalization out of his
limited experience.

~~~
jbellis
I've seen approximately zero correlation between degree status and ability to
write code. The best programmer I've ever worked with has a PhD... but so have
at least two of the terrible ones.

I also submit that if programming is "not exactly challenging" then you are
working on the wrong products and/or at the wrong level of abstraction.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer research, or management, or marketing,
or sales over development, but lack of challenge is not one of them.

------
mathattack
The incentive system in academia is to produce people who cite their mentors
in formal research. That's it. Because universities are non-profits, they go
to the indirect incentives. This trumps any altruistic ideals. In their
defense, most Phds in computer science are fully funded, so it's not
transactional like an undergrad degree.

I've worked with several Phds with background in Stats and Computer Science. I
found all to have "Good Background" - they knew a lot about their fields. Some
were great at working with others, but some not so much. It wasn't a magical
degree. Many regretted not getting the 5 years of work experience instead.
Relative to the All But Dissertation crowd, they were a little better at
Getting Things Done, versus just talking about things. (Very small sample
size, so don't read too much into it)

~~~
_delirium
I don't think your analysis of the incentives is accurate at all. If I were to
oversimplify similarly, I'd say instead that modern incentives in CS academia,
for non-tenured faculty at top research universities, heavily favor money,
wherever it comes from (in large part because with budget cuts, professors
have no choice). Grants are good, industrial partnerships are good, basically
anything that brings in money is good. Citations are secondary, and used
mainly as a stepping stone to bring in money. From that perspective, students
going to a big company are good, especially a big company like Microsoft, IBM,
or Intel that funds research. Students going into academia to write papers
that cite the advisor are also good, but not as good as students who go
somewhere that has money.

------
bearmf
_Do you work 9 to 5, or do you take your work home with you? This, again, is
completely independent of what degree you have. How you structure your
priorities and your work to get it done within sane hours, and while
maintaining some sort of “work/life balance” (I hate that term, but that is a
whole other story) is entirely up to you._

This is indeed independent of degree but highly dependent of company you are
working for. There are developers working 10-12 hours a day who cannot
_structure their work_ because they are just expected to stay in the office
for said time period.

------
pbiggar
The major distinction I've found from having a PhD is that you come with
built-in "social proof". If you're going for a job, you're very likely to get
an interview. If you're talking to investors, you're very likely to get past
the first triage. After that it's up to you of course, but that's pretty
useful.

------
tokenadult
The submitted article contains a key fact, "The problem with this picture is
that there are 10 PhD graduates for every tenure-track position. And, while I
don’t have figures, the industrial labs don’t hire at a much faster rate
either. And that left regular industry jobs as the only viable option for the
vast majority of PhDs," which actually applies to a lot of academic major
subjects. For the most part, sooner or later a Ph.D. holder may have to
consider working for an organization in the for-profit private sector rather
than for academia, simply because the private sector is where the majority of
the jobs are.

I see that the top few comments in this thread as I read the submitted article
are mostly about coding tests as a hiring procedure. If the coding test is a
reasonably accurate simulation of actual work on the job, it is a very good
idea for a company to use a coding test in hiring. From participants in
earlier discussions here on Hacker News I have learned about many useful
references on the subject of company hiring procedures, which I have gathered
here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter,
"The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology:
Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings,"
Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed
professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology
devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring
criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews
for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so
on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after
they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States,
prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most
other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general
mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable
secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work
reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test,
such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample
test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the
applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of
the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone is only 0.54 for work sample
tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests
has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general
mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be
trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on
the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than
any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous
research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your
company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into
all of your hiring processes.

Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does
not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment),
it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such
as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a
routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424
(1971) case

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a
general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact"
on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship
to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words,
a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or
like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had
best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on
the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like
tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no
one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-
teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if
it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company
defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it
is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to
successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite
expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different
laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries
is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States,
allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of
the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has
from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the
first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is
explained in many books about hiring procedures

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-
deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few
decades, with the prospect for further changes.

<http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full>

[http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false)

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article
showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures,
a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature,
for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection
procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias
Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of
Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind
you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an
integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a
conscientiousness measure."

[http://geb.uni-
giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...](http://geb.uni-
giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the
world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening
in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low
predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g.,
Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page,
1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir,
2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work
sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless
procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied
somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In
Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing
(i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use
them)."

Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have
significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test
or work-sample test.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing>

[http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1](http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1)

<http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF>

[http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports...](http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-14602.html)

Bottom line: if you are someone with a Ph.D. degree in an academic subject,
congratulations. If you seek a job outside academia with good management that
understands research, be prepared to do a work sample test to get the job.
Companies that hire on the basis of resume biographical qualifications (what
degree you have) do demonstrably worse in hiring than companies that make sure
that all job applicants can do the actual work of the job. Wouldn't you rather
work somewhere where the company focus is on hiring the capable, rather than
on hiring the possessors of school credentials?

~~~
jseliger
_The submitted article contains a key fact, "The problem with this picture is
that there are 10 PhD graduates for every tenure-track position. And, while I
don’t have figures, the industrial labs don’t hire at a much faster rate
either. And that left regular industry jobs as the only viable option for the
vast majority of PhDs," which actually applies to a lot of academic major
subjects._

The humanities are worse: [http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-
should-kno...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-
before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-
opportunity-costs/) .

------
magnusgraviti
Here in Ukraine people write their PhD thesis and work in IT industry because
scientist salary is extra low (300$) and average salary in industry is about
1500$+

I found the same situation with PhD status as this article highlights. Degree
means nothing here. Really nothing. The only thing which matters are results
of your work. PhD should be better in analysis, problem solving etc.

------
arido
One thing to add: when we interview PhD's we make sure they want to be in
industry. There is nothing more off putting when you talk to someone and it
becomes immediately clear they much rather would've been in academia but they
were not the right person at the right time.

------
xmpir
I think in Europe (at least in Austria) a PhD is a pretty huge factor for a
job in industry. In my opinion this is a bad thing, but academic degrees are
very important here. This does not especially consider the computer science
industry, but it happens there as well. There are some positions that are
always taken by academics, for the sake of publicity and reputation. No matter
what they can do, the only important thing is the PR-effect of a academic
degree.

~~~
barry-cotter
Nowhere on Earth has a higher opinion of academic degrees and higher education
than the German speaking world. And if anyplace equals it I don't know where
it is.

~~~
brazzy
Even within the German speaking world, Austria has a reputation of being
obsessed with titles.

------
DennisP
XKCD's perspective: <http://xkcd.com/664/>

