What every PhD should know before interviewing with a tech startup

Re:What every PhD should know before interviewing with a tec... by hedora on Friday July 21, 2017 @02:27AM (#14818473)

What? A decent PhD needs to have a payback horizon (time between start to commercialization) of over 5 years. Startups cannot afford that level of risk. PhDs should be much riskier than startup pitches.

Maybe it is an artifact of the fact that I work on computer systems research (where the focus is on finding the simplest solution that works) but the comments here make me wonder where you (collectively) are finding your PhD candidates!

I do agree that is often OK for PhD code to be terrible ("least publishable unit"), but that is also true of non-core production code at startups! ("Minimum viable product")

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Re:What every PhD should know before interviewing with a tec... by noobermin on Friday July 21, 2017 @03:16AM (#14818669)

Furthermore, the article under consideration speaks to that:

>Many PhD students can be perfectionists. But they need to remember that there’s an important compromise that needs to be made between the best solution and a good solution that can be used in practice.

Code quality doesn't seem to be a concern for Dr. O at least.

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