
Software jobs, PhDs and over-qualification - paulsb
http://semanticlifescience.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/software-jobs-phds-and-over-qualification/
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lallysingh
Odd, (I'm still finishing my PhD) I haven't gotten any such negative feedback.
OTOH, it helps if:

1\. Your PhD has real-world applicability. Which is not hard.

2\. Your potential employers could apply those skills.

3\. You can actually code pretty well, too.

I think this third item is often the issue. PhDs often have underdeveloped
programming abilities compared to industry vets the same age -- too much
classwork, not enough larger-scale projects. There are good ways around this:
graduate research assistantships that require reasonable code, collaborative
research that requires you build your part of a system, internships, etc.

At least for the places that I've worked and do work now, if they think you
can get the job done, you're in good shape. Then again, I don't apply to the
1000-monkeys on 1000 typewriter coder/body shops, either.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I get the impression 3 is a problem. From the discussion thread where the job
seeker asks for help:

Someone offering a helpful suggestion: _Dude...if you have a PhD...there is no
excuse for you to not be able to remember your C coding with barely a day's
effort._ [This refers to job interview questions about the complexity of
linked lists and such.]

The PhD having job seeker: _...there's a mental mode where you're doing those
low-level things and you do lose it after college and after not working any
more with C/C++. Reviewing it doesn't help that much. I dislike the notion
that I just went to the job and then realized I had to practice._

That's not to say that things are bad out there. When I got my Ph.D.,
recruiters would cold call me ("Want to work in the financial industry?"). Now
I'm actively looking and rarely get called back. I guess I need to network a
bit more...

~~~
billswift
Yes. Programming is a complex skill, like using math or a foreign language, if
you want to stay good at it, you MUST stay in practice.

------
kurtosis
Wow this is really depressing to contemplate. Has anyone here been through the
experience where you went to grad school for curiosity and found that it made
you unemployable? I really fear this outcome. I went to graduate school
because I looked up at the end of my undergrad degree and realized that my
knowledge of Physics was very shallow. I was pretty obvious just from the
numbers I was extremely unlikely to get any kind of academic employment, but I
decided that it didn't matter because I was sure I could talk to someone and
convince them that I was a "practical" person. In another year I'm going to
look seriously for a job and this story scares me. Is it really this hard to
find a job solving hard practical problems with computers? Would someone
seriously say that it's "too theoretical" to have experience building
scientific instruments and software to control them in a lab, software that by
construction has a _real_ user? It really worries me that someone with a PhD
in soft eng from CMU had such a hard time. This doesn't leave me much hope of
crossing fields.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I think the person is more wildly confused than anything else. I don't know of
any PhD students having trouble getting jobs. Somehow this person has gotten
the impression that what you do with a PhD is go out and get an entry level
job prorgramming RoR or something. That is not the case.

~~~
cousin_it
I agree that people can enter and follow the programming career path easily
without a PhD. Completing a PhD equips you to follow your dream of science, of
being a patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night, but it doesn't
exactly help you make money. Like studying classical music for ten years and
then complaining you can't get a job: dude, I hate to upset you, but a "job"
wasn't the point at all.

~~~
whacked_new
One thing I realized was that the PhD isn't what makes you the patent clerk by
day and brilliant theorist by night. It is the brilliant theorist that makes
you the PhD and the patent clerk by day.

This is true, at least in Einstein's case. Or, s/patent clerk/surfer/g,
s/Einstein/Garrett Lisi/g But the romanticism has gone out of proportion.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Actually, I don't understand this either. The PhD is what makes you a patent
clerk by day? Does anyone actually know Einstein's real history and not the
vague stuff written on the backs cereal cartons? This sounds like the same
stuff people say when they erroneously talk about Einstein as having not been
good at mathematics. As for all this stuff about how PhDs don't make any money
and how no one cares about their work boo hoo wah wah .. There are thousands
of working PhDs that would disagree with you all and think you all out of your
minds!

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troystribling
I am a PhD, in physics, that left academic research about 10 years ago for a
programming career. As a researcher I studied Computational Fluid Dynamics.
All of my programming jobs have been in network management or a related field.
My Ph.D has been a plus at every job I have held. Over qualification has never
been an issue.

I left academia for two reasons: pay and a preference for programming to the
drudgery of publication. I started my programming career near the peak of 2000
tech bubble and had doubled my salary within with a couple of years. Six
figure programming salaries are far more common than six figure salaries in
academic research.

An additional bonus which I did not anticipate was the competitive advantage I
would have. Competition for academic positions is quite intense involving many
capable people. This is likely why salaries remain low. In programming the
typical skill level is much lower.

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edw519
"usually employers look for someone that codes like a robot"

Wrong. Usually employers look for someone to get the frickin job done without
rethinking the problem. Classic example right now: I have PhD in Strategic
Planning telling me to make the algorithm calculate the Economic Order
Quantity when creating the Purchase Order. The Buyer immediately gave me 4
reasons why that will never work in the real world: the vendor will have to
interrupt set-ups for plan changes, the bank will never approve that line of
credit, the rev level may change before the end of the run, and oh, by the
way, that many won't fit on the truck.

"...trying to get a plain ol’ developer position..."

You have an attitude problem. There's nothing "plain ol'" about what we do
every day. While you were busy in your ivory tower for 8 years, _someone_ had
to keep the world moving.

"companies want the 20 year-olds to code quick and turn out an app with a
6-month lifetime"

On what planet? You were obviously too busy in college to actually find out
what really goes on in the real world.

"6-8 years in graduate school under constant stress torn your ego into to
pieces"

Poor baby. Get a job. Feed, clothe, and shelter a family. Deliver something
every day to someone who is depending on you. For those of us who have been
doing this for years, earning a PhD sounds like a vacation.

~~~
miloshh
As someone just finishing Ph.D. that also had industry jobs, I can say most of
what you say seems wrong. There indeed are plain old developer positions,
consisting of e.g. making some frontend talk to some backend - most real-world
corporate programming is like that.

"Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you" - this is
exactly what you have to do in a Ph.D. program all the time - you have
coauthors on papers that have to be shipped, and yours and their future
depends on it.

In the corporate world, you also have to deliver, but at least what you're
doing is well known to be possible. In academia you have a constant feeling
that you might be against an impossible problem, and the results will never
come together.

Plus in the corporate world, you can work 9am-7pm at most, rather than
11am-2pm as in grad school. And the pay is 4x higher. Now what sounds more
like a vacation?

(Of course, here I was referring to a PhD in Computer Science. I don't know
what's Strategic Planning, so I can't judge there.)

~~~
edw519
As someone who has been in the real world for 30 years (after 20 years of
schooling), I _know_ most of what I say _is_ fairly accurate.

I really don't mean to pick on you (or anyone else), but inaccurate claims
about that with which you are not familiar deserve response.

"There indeed are plain old developer positions..."

Of course there are. And for everyone of those, there is someone else changing
the world.

"this is exactly what you have to do in a Ph.D. program all the time"

Fair enough.

"In the corporate world, you also have to deliver, but at least what you're
doing is well known to be possible."

Not my experience. "Do x, y, and z by the first of next quarter or you're out
of business." You frequently don't know if what you're trying to do is
possible. But you have to do it anyway. This happens all the time.

"you can work 9am-7pm at most..."

If only.

I admit that my "vacation" remark may have ruffled some feathers, and I love
what I do, but it would be my dream come true to quit work and go back to a
college PhD program. I know I'm not alone in this.

AFAIC, work is to make a living, education is what we live for.

~~~
miloshh
We are not disagreeing. Here you're referring to your position of leadership
and responsibility that you have risen to after 30 years, but I was talking
about code monkeys.

"Do x, y, and z by the first of next quarter or you're out of business." Sure,
but new developer hires in large companies are absolutely not in a position to
decide where the business is going, and won't be for quite some time. The
article and my comment were about the entry-level developer positions.

"And for everyone of those, there is someone else changing the world."
Absolutely, and I greatly admire such people. But you won't change the world
in an entry-level developer job. I tried such jobs, they were very easy and I
suffered a lot the lack of opportunity to change the world.

------
angstrom
_Even though you are screaming at your prospective employer, saying “yes I’ve
done all the crazy stuff during the PhD, but now just want a job to code to
feed my family”, they may not hire you not so much of over-qualification, but
rather over-thinking._

Case in point, if you want a lower level position, remove the PhD from your
resume. Stop over-thinking the problem. It's a perfectly valid solution to say
you have a masters or bachelors instead so you can feed your family. Employers
are perfectly valid in excluding PhDs if they are concerned about over
qualifications costing more or leading to boredom.

------
electromagnetic
The thing I always wonder about is 'PhD stupidity'. Basically, PhD's usually
seem to get a sense of entitlement, which may put them at a disadvantage when
entering the real world and leaving the academic world. What the author seems
to be misunderstanding, is that employers aren't impressed by a PhD for an
entry level job (actually it probably makes them very hesitant). However, the
PhD is likely to get trapped into the whole 'I have a PhD so I'm important'
mentality that seems to go around, so they never figure out that the PhD is
stopping them getting a real job.

I think the other major problem is that people take PhD's that won't help them
get a job. I've known forensic scientists who've been stuck in deli counters,
because there's only a handful of available jobs in the entire western world.
I've known journalist grads who've been flat out rejected because of their
degree, because it teaches them poor skills (the main skill desired now is the
ability to write with personality, which journalism courses actively
discourage).

So I'm sure there's a lot of ways that can contribute to a PhD making you
unemployable, however it's probably always down to poor choice or poor
judgment.

Personally I'd love to get a PhD in physics out of pure interest. However, the
one thing I'd worry about, and I've told to friends going the PhD route, is
that taking a PhD keeps you out of the career field for 10+ years. So you have
to really evaluate if 10+ years of experience is better for you career wise
than a PhD and 0 years experience, because all the fields I'm interested in
(career wise, not academically) don't give a damn if you have a PhD, so even
though I'd like to have a degree in something I'm not going to waste my time.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I don't think you seem to know what a PhD is about.

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dinkumthinkum
I don't understand this. Why is a recent PhD trying to get entry level
programming jobs?

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geebee
I think we need to rethink what we mean by "overqualified". An MD isn't
necessarily overqualified for a job as an RN - in fact, such a person might be
underqualified. Just because you have "higher" credentials doesn't necessarily
mean your credentials are a superset of what is needed.

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puzzle-out
I'm wondering how many HN users have phds. Poll time anyone? (or has it
already been done).

~~~
adw
There are three of us working at the startup I work at, and we've all got
PhDs; chemistry, chemical physics and computational mineralogy respectively.

What we're doing has very little to do with any of the science we perpetrated,
though!

