I find this generalization a bit hard to believe. Good academic researchers should be obsessed with knowing why they do things. After all, researching the state of the art and identifying a knowledge gap is what they do. And they should also be quite good at documenting the how since they write a lot of methods sections.
Maybe not in mathematics as I have no idea what a math PhD thesis looks like but for all other fields I know I'd expect a good researcher to be exceptionally good at giving a reasoning for why they do something and also at knowing what other approaches were tried by other people and what the pros and cons are.
But I find the comparison PhD vs. developer a bit unfair. I agree that you become a better developer if you develop for 4 years instead of doing a PhD. Even in CS, a PhD entails many things that are not developing, namely writing papers, getting grant money, teaching etc.
However, I also agree with you that if the goal is to become a better programmer, a PhD is not the way to get there (imo).
Maybe not in mathematics as I have no idea what a math PhD thesis looks like but for all other fields I know I'd expect a good researcher to be exceptionally good at giving a reasoning for why they do something and also at knowing what other approaches were tried by other people and what the pros and cons are.
But I find the comparison PhD vs. developer a bit unfair. I agree that you become a better developer if you develop for 4 years instead of doing a PhD. Even in CS, a PhD entails many things that are not developing, namely writing papers, getting grant money, teaching etc.
However, I also agree with you that if the goal is to become a better programmer, a PhD is not the way to get there (imo).