Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD.
This is no different than anyone who spends all their time producing a great album, or building a company or programming a game and I could go on.
The PhD if you want to talk about it in generalized terms has no unique properties that can't be accomplished through other means.
> Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD.
I often equate my Ph.D. with the ability to teach myself how to do things. Ex. going from a wet/dry lab biologist with zero experience in C-style languages, to learning Arduino's flavor of Cpp and the PID control library to run process controls for your wet lab biology experiment.
That makes it sound like a pretty terrible value, honestly. That kind of "fake it till you make it" plunging into new domains is something people often learn without spending 6 years fighting academia. In fact, your exact example is the kind of project you'd buy for e.g. a teen that likes computers.
I still the think the main value of a PhD is learning to wade through adversarial bullshit and bureaucracy and actually deliver something unless your career overlaps heavily with your research.
This is no different than anyone who spends all their time producing a great album, or building a company or programming a game and I could go on.
The PhD if you want to talk about it in generalized terms has no unique properties that can't be accomplished through other means.