How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley?

Re:How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley? by grmarcil on Monday October 19, 2015 @02:51PM (#10414799)

A PhD program basically produces a researcher who is the world's expert in a very very narrow area of a subfield. As a job candidate, a PhD holder could offer, in descending order of "putting their degree to use", A) their subfield specialty, B) their ability to work as a researcher, C) being a smart human.

If you're interviewing a PhD for a nuts and bolts software engineering role, you are basically hiring on the basis of C, ie their degree is a dubious value add for you. PhDs are rarely going to be an ideal hire for a startup unless their subfield is literally the core of your business.

As an aside, I am bewildered by the the idea of a CS PhD holder who literally cannot code in any language. But short of seeing their CV, who knows. Maybe they specialized in the more theoretical math- or EE-like areas of CS, and their undergrad data structures course was a distant memory?

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Re:How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley? by BinaryIdiot on Monday October 19, 2015 @03:44PM (#10415192)

> As an aside, I am bewildered by the the idea of a CS PhD holder who literally cannot code in any language. But short of seeing their CV, who knows. Maybe they specialized in the more theoretical math- or EE-like areas of CS, and their undergrad data structures course was a distant memory?

One mostly did neural network research and said his coding was rusty so he has having issues. The other I honestly can't remember. But yeah I'd assuming coding was pretty important but I kinda got the impression from both of them that maybe they had underlings do the grunt work or something. But not entirely sure.

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