Of course you can learn things without this structure, but having a phd is a reasonable short hand for ability in independent innovation, perhaps companies lean on it a bit much, but that is not unique to phds.
The main problem I've had bridging phd's to commercial work is hitting the right focus on skill development in areas that were deficient/missing in their course of study. A classic example, a lot of technical phds who have programmed every day for many years ... are not skilled programmers. They can become so, but have to want to learn (and not dismiss it as "trivial")
When I've worked with non-PhDs in a science environment, it's the rigorous breakdown of experimental approach that's often missing. Unless the individual had a really strong track record demonstrating this skill, I'd heavily favor PhDs for biotech/science positions on a leadership track.
That said, I'm quite biased, have to justify the years I lost somehow :)
Moreover, I only have a bachelor's, but I had 6 years of training and humiliating embarrassments from those 30% of people, which I believe strongly contributed to my experimental rigor. I dont know that every person with a PhD has dealt with that kind of pain and would be biased against people that haven't dealt with that pain.
I’d also say that 30% is still not a bad ratio and better than most training sources on average.
Still it’s not a perfect screen by any means.
I'm sure you are familiar with the concept of fuckyou money. Its a different number for different people.
Say that number is 5. I will give you many examples below. Every example is a real living person. I personally know every one of these people.
(enterprise programmer in stodgy bank in usa) 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5
(enterprise programmer in stodgy bank in poor country) 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.5 + ... + 0.5 = 5
( steady progress in startup until faang acquired it) 0.5 + 0.8 + 1.2 + 1.2 + 1.3 + 6 > 5
( many failed startups in valley until 1 success) 0.5 + 0.8 + -2 + 0.5 + 0.7 + -2 + 0.5 + 20 >> 5
( phd student whose invention was purchased by salesforce ) 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 15 >> 5
( phd student who ended up in fang ) 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 + 2 + 3 > 5
etc.
I suppose it might not work out in such a way for all research though. I was lucky enough that my coursework left me with enough math and statistical skills to either learn or fake my way through most relevant math intensive computing stuff while my actual work was things like parallel optimization schemes for neural network training (and lots of programming in the big frameworks)
- I made more on my first day of work than almost any of my professors will make on their last day work.
- I also personally know 3 PhDs at tech companies in the Bay that make substantially less than me despite being 4-6 years older than me.
- I am also acquainted with two people that made an obscene amount of money from their tech skills; one maxed out at a high diploma and the other a PhD.
- The other 20 or so PhDs I know don't make substantially more than I do.
- I've also seen a few PhDs at my last company end up as systems engineers which is incredibly depressing because they could have been employed in that same role if they stopped at a bachelors.
It’s only depressing if they feel like they didn’t get anything out of their PhD :)
I dare you to write a study to excavate and delineate the potential effects of this bias on hiring.
I had never thought about degrees in those terms, but that feels like a surprisingly terse and accurate description. Thanks!
In undergrad I had a really nice meta course called GEOG 100: On Becoming a Geographer. Loved it. One slide I remember was that a bachelor's was becoming acquainted with the discipline. A master's is to become an expert in a domain. And a PhD is to drill deep into a domain and uncover something new.
Breadth vs. depth basically.
I'm not convinced, or I should say my experience does not support this. I think it is more likely that those that already have that skill are the ones that pursue the Ph.D path.
I don't think all Ph.D. students or any ordinary engineer can take a vaguely defined research problem and make it succeed. Ph.D. doesn't necessarily prepare you for the research part; it does, however, prepare you to advertise a very /bad solution/ as a novel contribution. It wasn't always like this, but it has come to it. It takes credibility, curiosity, character, and of course, research skills to solve a vaguely defined problem---none of which are given to you by a Ph.D. degree.
I have worked at two FAANGs, and more often than not my interactions with Ph.D. degree holders have left a bad taste in my mouth. Speaking of which, there was one person that was "selling" an event timeline as a root cause analysis system that does "temporal" correlation (with no filtering or association at all) :). And another person that was advertising a DFS compilation of a neural net during the training phase (as opposed to the typical BFS that people do) as a superior and novel contribution that changes how we think about neural nets or something along those lines.
A good engineer would have laughed at both after carefully considering all aspects of the problem.
I suspect that Ph.D. "engineers" are more desirable because of their broader skillset (they have worked with more tools and have taken more classes) and also the fact that companies can hire them at almost the same cost as a BS/MS degree holders. Plus universities have already done some filtering on Ph.Ds.
The first is worth their weight in gold, the second is fairly easy to detect after a few git check-ins.
Actually I lied, there's a third kind, brilliant people that get bored with their job and write super-complicated frameworks to satiate that boredom. That's not restricted to PhDs but I see it more often with them.
Reasons might include: couldn't make it in real jobs and delayed joining the the job force for as long as possible
doesn't want to be held accountable for actual working solutions and likes working towards "novelty"
enjoys approaching every problem with the most complicated possible solution they are aware of
thinks generalization is the only way to approach specific special-case problems, if they can't find a generalized solution then they think its unsolvable even when the special-case solution is fine
has grand research ideas they weren't able to convince anybody in academia to fund and think they can chip away at those ideas by cowing coworkers into working on it for them
likes being the "smart guy in the room" and builds a career of talking a lot with complex technobabble and buzzwords but has no idea what they're saying (I've encountered many many of these myself) -- often has mile long CVs as well
creditialists who think racking up pretend education credits is the most important thing in life
failed academics who point to their large private sector salaries as why they've ended up on the superior path than their old peers
and so on....these are literally descriptions of people I've encountered just in my current job over the past 5 years...it keeps going on and on.
Considering a PhD is supposed to provide skills for learning and tackling problems, the incredibly high percentage of PhDs I've worked with that are completely unable to do so has really really put me off of the credential.
Some PhD-holders were self-motivated before. Others learned it at school. Still others were motivated, but unfocused, and had to become disciplined.
Everyone who has a strong opinion on the topic is, by definition, extrapolating from limited data. Moreover, even if every single PhD learned nothing in school, it’s still a useful signal if it enriches the pool of candidates who are self-motivated and independent.
Few better ways to take that to the extreme in many cases than a PhD.
Also, as a foreigner, can't help but point out that there seems to universally be a lot of assumptions made with academic qualifications and the like with many countries immigration laws and systems...
You might have a bit of that skill to start with but a PhD lets you practice and hone that skill, which you wouldn't be doing in a standard coding position.
I like the way you put this. I am researcher in academia, and my parents (who do not have advanced degrees and have never done research) always ask me "When you get into the lab, how do you know what to do?".
No one really tells me. My PI only gives very general research directions. It's up to experience and intuition, part of which was gained during my grad student years.
But also agree there are other ways to learn that as well. There will never be a one-size-fits-all solution.
Interesting, that was not the impression I had from 2 engineering professors at my local uni.
It sounded like I was going to be their assistant in studying their idea for up to 6 years.
Pretty accurate. I was asked in a job interview once "what practical applications does your research have that would benefit us?" - they were surprised when I said my research results weren't useful to them at all, but the skills and broader knowledge I gained doing the research would be.
It's very uncommon you go seeking a company where you can directly apply what you did your thesis on. Your thesis topic pretty much has to be niche and obscure if it's on the edge of current knowledge.
I’d like to elaborate on this a bit further. In my experience as an academic researcher in a technical field (math), one of the most important skills is the ability formulate precise statements/hypotheses that satisfy several criteria. First, they should relate to the existing body of research in your field in a meaningful way. Second, they should have non-trivial answers (in the context of math, i mean that the proof of your hypothesized theorem should be legitimately nontrivial, not merely obfuscated to appear that way, as good mathematicians will be able to tell) or reveal something that was previously unexpected (such as a connection between two previously different topics). Finally, they must be testable/verifiable/provable/etc using your available methodologies and within a predictable timeframe.
Given how insightful your comment was, I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Why, outside of comorbidity, do you think depression and anxiety might be related to developing this skillset?
But what I've noticed is that aside from frequently co-occurring with creative work, depression and anxiety are frequently the trigger to finding a non-obvious solution and making forward progress. In other words, they're not just mental disorders; they're feelings that can give you useful signal about how to proceed next, if you listen very carefully to them. Anxiety is basically your emotional systems being hyper-engaged, such that you get an emotional response from nearly everything. Depression feels like the opposite, a deadening of your emotional senses, but oftentimes escaping the depression actually points the way to escaping your real-world problem. If you can imagine a future where you are not depressed (which if you've suffered clinical depression is actually quite difficult), very likely that's a strong signal that that's what you should actually be doing, no matter how weird or unreasonable it sounds.
There's some evidence for this hypothesis here (2009):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressions-evolu...
You could also think of the anxiety related to creative work in relation to System 1 of the brain in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. In highly ambiguous circumstances (which basically all creative work is), it makes sense for your brain to become hypersensitive to all available stimuli, and to quickly pattern-match on a course of action without too much rational consideration. We experience that sort of emotional overload as anxiety.
Today, when you're tasked with creating something new, and your identity is invested in such a mission, it's a much more gargantuan task than being indispensable to your local tribe. Competing at a global level is just not something we're generally wired to do. I would be curious if world-class athletes, movie stars, business executives, politicians, etc. also have similar emotional problems.
But our emotions do not work on such a scale. They're meant to deal with the anxieties of what a few hundred people in your community think and how to secure your next meal.
In creative lines of work (however one chooses to define it), one is trying to be the superlative best or first to achieve something valuable on the scale of billions of people. And you probably hope that such a creation outlives you. We have not been designed for such tasks at an emotional level.
I've heard and observed that the Ph.D teaches you one crucial skill - how to take a vaguely defined research problem that nobody has done before, where you're not even sure that a solution exists, and make tangible, rigorous progress on it. Your actual doctoral topic as a Ph.D student will probably be useless. Most of your coursework is the same as what any master's degree gives you. But the experience that sets you apart from B.S. and M.S. graduates is that of slogging through a dissertation, trying to make an original contribution to knowledge.
There are other ways to develop this skillset. Founding a company does it as well, as does developing a new product from scratch. High-level creative work (eg. writing a novel, getting traction for your band, producing a theatrical performance or radio show) does as well. Companies love to hire candidates from these backgrounds as well, but most don't want to work for someone else. (Interestingly, depression and anxiety might actually be a feature of developing this skillset, not a bug - these two mental disorders are endemic among these fields as well.)
The reason employers get hung up on this is because the economic returns to innovation are at an all-time high these days, and so developing that blockbuster new product or highly-efficient new process makes a lot of money. And part of the reason returns to innovation are so high is because so few people are actually innovating. While there certainly exist people with just a bachelors or even no degree at all who are capable of innovating, a large number of bachelor's holders do not have the toolset or mental fortitude to break out beyond what everybody else knows and create new knowledge.