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1

I have found this comic pic on Steve Hanov's blog: enter image description here

The most of the points are true obviously. What I can't comprehend is, why having Ph.D is considered as a "bad thing"?

enter image description here

Any thoughts?

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Its good that you think that HR knows what a compiler is...:) – Emmad Kareem Aug 21 '12 at 21:11

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5 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

Joke images aside, this is common in my experience:

  1. A PhD in Computer Science involves writing surprisingly little actual code.
  2. The degree provides no experience with the full lifecycle of software.
  3. PhD candidates demand higher salary.
  4. There is a concern about their ability to fit in with a team of programmers.
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up vote 15 down vote

The idea is that the the Ph.D spent years in academia, which is radically different from "real" software development in industry. A software engineer who has worked in the industry for years thinks all the academic knowledge is harmful in real environments.

That's the joke anyway. It's accuracy is open to interpretation. Certainly academia and industry are radically different...

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up vote 7 down vote

I didn't get my Ph.D, but I did get my master's degree. I was literally laughed at for getting it at my day job because many things I was learning were "theoretically" awesome, but practically unfeasible for many of the projects I was on. I wrote an entire article on the subject. At the end of the day it's about experience. In general, there is no way that in a classroom setting you can have experience working on year+ long projects with 20+ developers. That experience is invaluable and changes everything.

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On the other hand, if you're doing graduate studies in a "theoretical" topic that you're interested in, equivalent experience in the real world is very rare indeed. And conversely, if you're planning to work in the real world there is no replacement for real world experience. Depends what your intentions are. – AerandiR Aug 21 '12 at 21:50
up vote 2 down vote

A PhD applying for a software developer job, even a senior dev, is like a neurosurgeon applying at a hospital for the open nurse's spot. A PhD on the resume of an applicant for a coding job (even a senior dev or analyst) tells me the following things:

  • This job was not your first choice; probably not even your top 10. IBM, Intel, Lockheed, Rockwell, three agencies of the U.S. Government, and five universities probably said no before you even considered applying to work here. That means you probably consider yourself above this job and are just looking to pay the bills until some research outfit has a change of heart.
  • You're going to want a lot of money for your level of education. I might have to offer six figures just to not insult you, while I can hire a BS or BBA who put the three years' difference in education into industry experience for $50-70k, and probably get someone who'll spin up faster and fit in better.
  • I'll be paying for your time spent on theory, not practice. If you have no industry experience I'll be paying you a senior dev's salary for entry-level practical knowledge. If you do have industry experience on top of the PhD, I probably can't afford you.

At my last job, we hired a PhD, a former professor, as a mid-level coder during a round of staff augmentation. He lasted two months before his shoddy code, inability to communicate (slight language barrier; he was Russian, though we had a couple other guys with thicker Russian accents who we begged to stay when they found other jobs) and general lack of productivity became intolerable.

The one I find even funnier, because it's even truer? -7 for taking a certification course. First off, you're telling me that if I want to develop you as a good coder, you're going to want me to shell out several grand a pop for cert classes (during which you won't be writing code for anything that makes me money). Second, the coder who replaced me at my first job had a list of certifications a foot long to compensate for no degree. That's admirable, but keep reading; despite an MCTS in C# development, she could not tell me how to define, subscribe to and raise an event in a Windows Form. Despite passing a cert test in ADO.NET, she asked me to explain SQL outer join syntax. I'm not making this up.

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up vote 1 down vote

I don't belive that the Ph.D it self is bad, because no matter the source of the life experience it's in general a good thing to have people to disagree with.

But the thing is that it could be a sign of something remarked as "bad", like, as mentioned, what are the values of a person with academic background? What skills does he left behind? Academics tend to be not as practical as the market expect.

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