Or that the merits of a suggestion were inversely proportional to an employee number, but cultures such as those frequently emerge in engineering driven organizations with a lot of smart people. I speculate that it is an offshoot off the imposter syndrome effect, when someone is feeling like an imposter and they are being asked to make a big decision, they search for externally generated metrics that would increase their confidence in the decision.

Degrees, low employee numbers, industry awards, are all signals that "someone else" thought this person was "good". And not even super geniuses understand everything about everything and they still have to make decisions.

Sad or not, in my experience working around gifted engineering teams it is not uncommon.

> Sad or not, in my experience working around gifted engineering teams it is not uncommon.

OK, so I had hoped that this was a problem unique to Google but I guess its not.

I just don't get this kind of thinking. I understand that a PhD is a good marker for intelligence... but not for ingenuity (maybe a tiny bit). I've worked with both PhD's and non PhD's... while PhD's are amazing to talk through different ideas, what may or may not work, the people I was most productive with have universally been people who get excited about technology (not saying they're mutually exclusive). Mind, not excited about fads, but those who can't wait to code a prototype to see if it really works as expected. Those who will jump in the middle of an outage and are excited to learn about what might have gone wrong.

Those are the attributes that I now look for whenever I have to make a choice between teams, between companies, whatever. The people that get excited by new designs and architectures, who love to talk through them, are the best people to work with.

I guess I do understand why Google is that way... I just hope that this kind of thinking doesn't infect other workplaces.

Google is a big company and maybe this was true but it feels false (having worked there & other large tech companies) that the reason for failing to get that project going was the lack of a PhD. Now having top engineers on board probably is key, but again that isn't tied to any advanced degree but due to Google hiring & promo committees which are intended to reward merit.

The value of this is multi-faceted. It shows technical validation by trusted engineering talent. Those engineers are able to expend their own political capital on the project. Those engineers have demonstrated an ability to navigate corporate hierarchy and deliver large-scale projects. One of the key requirements of higher levels of promotion is that you are focusing on strategic goals for the companies rather than strictly complex/important technical products.

Having interesting & exciting conversations is nothing. Everyone is smart & happy to nerd out about complex and interesting abstract concepts/designs. Doesn't mean that they think those ideas are worth pursuing or that they're worth pursuing right now.

Same here. What I noticed PhD people are more good candidate for research but not coding/finishing product. They put all their career in research tackling completely different set of problems. Most of time they are not aware of industry tools and applications like VCS, coding-styles etc and lack attitude to know context and more focused on (re)inventing something.

On other side engineer guys good to finish product, learn many half-assd tools and tacking different set of problems every day. This builds good intuition. But most of time they lack concept and they berate academics (at least in their early career days)

Now this is not universally applicable to everyone and may be wrong. I have seen some good people who rock both worlds.

A PhD is generally seen as "proof" that you can take a vague concept and perform high quality research. Obviously a PhD doesn't necessitate this and research is a VERY different skill than class work, but a PhD is likely seen to be lower risk for an employer (where any research is generally considered high risk).