STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

Re:STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisiti... by iamsalman on Monday March 10, 2014 @11:52AM (#7373611)

After the rise of "social" coding ala Github, it's now a lot easier to vet a candidate for a development job. PhD is only useful if the core product has a considerable overlap with your PhD thesis. A graduate degree doesn't help, in fact, if the time is invested in "specializing", one may lose out on gaining 2 years worth of core dev experience but I think it really depend on the type of job.

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Re:STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisiti... by yesiamyourdad on Monday March 10, 2014 @12:06PM (#7373702)

As others have noted, having an advanced degree should be a signal that the candidate is capable of deeply investing themselves into a subject area. The typecasting is ridiculous: just because you have no graduate degree but spent the first 3 years of your career working on, say, an online store, does that disqualify you from working in any other area of software engineering?

Github as CV has been debated already. Your employer may place restrictions on your ability to contribute to or publish open source. You may already be working 40+ hours a week and have other interests besides writing more code. If I'm not especially familiar with a project, I have no way to evaluate whether your contributions are valuable; I'm using the project owner's judgement as a proxy for my own. Maybe the project manager is a chump and the project is a mess, so does someone contributing 100 commits to that project count as a positive or a negative?

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Re:STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisiti... by seivan on Monday March 10, 2014 @12:16PM (#7373771)

I worked 70 hours week. I still had time to do open source. The debate isn't over. You can probably find my Github.

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Re:STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisiti... by dustingetz on Monday March 10, 2014 @02:31PM (#7374773)

Owning a popular open source project is obviously valuable. If you're capable of it, do that. The rest is excuses.

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Re:STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisiti... by mattgreenrocks on Monday March 10, 2014 @06:48PM (#7376197)

Open source is not the meritocracy many think it is.

Let's say you one-upped AngularJS with a new library. How would you compete with that sort of marketing muscle? Devs are no different from regular people: they don't want to change, they'll be averse to re-learning things, and they'll downgrade you for not being backed by Google.

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Re:STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisiti... by digita88 on Monday March 10, 2014 @02:35PM (#7374803)

I think that the GitHub comment should be extended beyond that and into non-academia projects. It should be emphasized that those hiring PhDs (and especially those that have been burnt - see this comment which exemplifies by experience http://chronicle.com/blogs/phd/2013/09/19/the-ph-d-industry-...) will be looking for evidence of work beyond academia. I am thinking within CS so I can't speak for the rest of STEM.

However the fault probably lies within the wider academia culture and the lack of expertise that academics/institutions provide to those wishing to leave and go to industry. Some PhDs genuinely do enter for the purpose of having a research career only to realise that academia is not for them and vice versa..

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