- B.S. = bull shit
- M.S. = more shit
- PhD = piled higher & deeper
She's a happy software tester now :-)
Unfortunately there was a huge gap in what was expected of these people and what they could actually do. Save but a few they were pretty awful employees for the job. Not necessarily their fault, but it's one example of the gamification of the system.
It might be different in Process Chemistry, which is where the best lab work is work. Perhaps those who have the magic in scaling up a reaction into production are like those who can debug anything? I've never worked with those groups or with the Analytical chemists in Development.
Disclaimer: I have a PhD, but never wished to go into academia due to the politics. And yeah, it's a union card.
I don't know which country GGP (or his wife) is from, and you might well be correct about your assessment, but there are some countries where master's degrees are viewed differently than in the U.S.
Where I live and did my degree (Northern Europe), it's commonplace to do a master's rather than just a bachelor's degree. In fact, in many fields the master's used to be considered the basic "undergrad" degree here. A bachelor's degree existed, but in many fields you'd have been considered to have dropped out of completing a master's if you only had bachelor's. That might be slowly changing, with a higher emphasis given to bachelor's level degrees, but the sentiment probably still remains.
And if you think an oversaturated job market pushing people into doing PhD's they don't need for the actual job isn't a problem for "the PhD system" then I call you short sighted.
Having one in CS myself U can assure you are right for the IT field. Getting this PhD was about personal aspiration rather than career success.
> (waste years and years of their lives) sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited
Suggesting that incentives to do research that follows academic tradition do not aligign with the best possible outcomes of independent investigation.
Which is what we both point out.
Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... );
Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything.