American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs

Re:American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs by CoolGuySteve on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @06:18PM (#19506719)

I find there are 2 kinds of PhD holders in engineering, those who are diligent and capable and were able to follow through on a difficult problem for years; and those whose problem solving abilities are so impractical that they stayed in school for as long as possible.

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.

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Re:American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs by bane on Thursday March 28, 2019 @12:02AM (#19509127)

There's so many people in the second category for so many reasons, its pretty much made "PhD" a "don't hire unless good reason" filter for me.

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.

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Re:American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs by meh2frdf on Thursday March 28, 2019 @03:37AM (#19510110)

Very similar experience here. I would also add generally a complete lack of comprehension of making something concrete that satisfies production.

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Re:American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs by bane on Thursday March 28, 2019 @08:36AM (#19511540)

Same. The real problem in my mind is the paradoxical complete inability to learn new skills that are suitable for the workplace and instead a complete reliance on the training they received in their programs...sometimes decades old.

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.

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