If you have a stack of resumes you're likely to interview everyone with a PhD, but only the ones with the most stellar github profile if they have no formal education.

During the interview if the PhD says something silly you'll probably disregard it. But the person without a formal education needs to be on point.

These and other filters means that a mediocre PhD can get through the hiring gauntlet but only the most kick ass high school graduates can make it through.

My mentor long ago likened these people to Eloi and the IT grunts to Morlocks. I cannot say I disagree.

Everyone is the hero of their own story. It sounds like your mentor is arrogant, and could use more intellectual humility.

>By the year AD 802,701, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi.

Please explain how is this arrogant?

Is the condescension and self-importance more clear now? It's an Us versus Them mentality which patronizes other people and looks down on their work.

In my experience, high performance in difficult degrees at good schools are a very strong indicator of future success.

We find gems outside the above profile, but it holds true even across the people we've hired from code schools.

I don't work for a FAANG.

50 years ago big companies would take you with just a HS degree, and if you were smart and showed initiative, put you under the wing of an engineer - or pay to send you to school. This does not happen anymore.

You're also SEVERELY limiting your career if all you complete is high school - you might be OK technically for now, but you will lack all kinds of foundations that would allow you to stay technical, and you'll certainly be disregarded completely as you age for any kind of leadership track.

I think the root of this myth (that having only a HS degree you can still get a technical job) is twofold: One, a currently hot hiring market, and two, the "be what you dream!" movement that was big in the 90's.

If you've worked through a recession (or even just a dulled market), and seen people around you lose their work, their homes, heard their struggles about how hard it is to find work - people would stop parroting this mantra about having minimal education. It's really doing damage to people who hear it.

I've been getting paid to build web apps since 2000, got in right when the first dot-com bust went down; I have never been out of work since entering this field.

I also tend to work for smaller companies.

But you're not going to build the first self-driving car without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to develop a new pharmaceutical without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to get the sort of branding that being the first to beat the best humans at Go/Chess/Poker can get you without an army including lots of PhDs. And so on.

You're absolutely right that PhDs aren't required for the sort of sys admin and coding work that's accessible to bright high schoolers. But there are very few competent CS PhDs who would even bother applying for those jobs.

Also, your comment isn't germane to the article because the article isn't talking about sys admin and coding jobs. I've literally never seen a job posting for a sys admin job that asks for a PhD. Have you?

You can't just throw bunch of great coders with high school diplomas at these problems and hope they would workout solutions. Solving any of above problems at the level we solve now would be considered pure magic and utterly surprising just a decade ago. These problems requires extensive mathematical modeling and leaning on research with incremental progress that has been collectively made by 100s of brilliant researchers over multiple decades. This is why PhD is desirable for "new tech".

I also don't regret dropping out of the program before finishing my PhD. After I finished my Master's and started pushing towards the PhD, I came to the realization that what I really wanted to do was just to build cool things, not spend my life in the publish-or-perish cycle of academia. So I stopped with my Master's, took a full-time staff position doing more-or-less exactly the same thing I was doing in my Research Assistantship except for a lot more money, and moved on with my life. And eventually got recruited to where I am now.

Why do you think research doesn't count as actually doing something?

The work is totally different; they're not substitutes.

When some people FB Core Data Science came to campus, they made it pretty clear that they were looking for people with doctoral training for their research work (and not, for example, a Master's graduate who completed PhD-level coursework), so I guess it depends on the task/team.

> Anyone can learn to code, be a great sysadmin, or a network guru. All it takes is want power. If you want it bad enough, you will get there.

For a second there I thought I was reading some motivational speaker material. I'm not even going to try to explain how wrong that is.

I definitely could got where I am without the PhD. Hell I wouldn't have needed the engineering degree either and I'd be pretty rich by now, but I don't regret doing the degree because I learnt loads and had fun doing uni things.