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.
Coding is not necessarily part of a PhD (even in Comp Sci!) and programming well certainly isn't. No one will ever look at that code, inspect, test it, document it or complain when any of those things are missing
When I applied for software engineering jobs the recruiters ignored my 3 years of Java/Python programming for the PhD and my 4 years of embedded Java programming for research labs. All that counts is the time when you were delivering code to paying customers in a commercial setting :(
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...
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.