5 ms·

I disagree with the bulk of this article. It certainly varies a lot of by field but in biophotonics I've seen a lot of extremely poor candidates, people who say

I disagree with the bulk of this article. It certainly varies a lot of by field but in biophotonics I've seen a lot of extremely poor candidates, people who say things like "I don't do math", "I don't want to teach", "MATLAB is for other people", "I'm not a biologist so I can't explain my work". When I first started I thought these people sucked, and I was going to be great. What I learned is that the graduate development opportunities are rare, and many of the reason people suck are beyond their control. For example, working on tedious projects or bullshit projects, do to your PI's conflict of interest. Or simply put that your research rests on a foundation of lies. So, on one hand we have many people on the other hand we don't have many qualified people.

untilHellbanned 10y ago
Serious analysis irony here - your anecdote doesn't reverse the mountain of data in the other direction.
p4wnc6 10y ago
Saying "MATLAB is for other people" isn't the sign of a poor candidate. Saying "you will need to use MATLAB for this job" on the other hand is overwhelmingly a sign of a bad job, in the same way that any usage of Excel VBA whatsoever is a sign to run, run, run for the hills -- that firm is absolutely doing it wrong. I've also heard the opposite of your first example used as a criticism of candidates too. After completing my undergrad degree in math and then grad degrees in statistics, I was astounded how in industry, either describing yourself more as an engineer or scientist who does not work on the abstract math stuff or describing yourself as someone who is very interested in abstract math will both cause you to get rejected. The only way to win is to happen to have done a lot of difficult abstract math in the past and remember it all well enough to pass tricky interviews, but then to be overwhelmingly happy and satisfied with a job that will not ever ask you to use it and will instead burn you out on dumb shit stuff like fitting a regression to KPI data and using t-stats to directly do (fallacious) model comparison. The biggest career risk I've seen from having done very computer science-heavy statistics is underemployment. Your math chops will be pure credential, sometimes used by your manager to try to win arguments from authority about e.g. that dumb shit KPI regression. But you will 100% never be given open-ended modeling work that could actually have a positive impact on your business's bottom line. Essentially, you are hired to be some more senior person's sycophant political darling. You function internally much the same way that a big consulting company functions externally -- people already know what they want to hear, they just want you to tell them what they want to hear, slap together some plausible-sounding rationalizations for it, dress it up with buzzwords about big data and "insights", and be a show pony for talking about it. They emphatically do not want you for doing anything that would be called "real" work. There are occasional exceptions, especially in certain teams at certain established tech companies. But then, landing a position inside one of those teams is nothing but the same lottery as winning a professorship all over again.
- nradov 10y ago
  Welcome to the real world of being an employee. It's common in every field for new employees to be academically overqualified and think their bosses are incompetent and irrational. If you don't like it then try starting your own company. I'm not being flippant; that's a serious suggestion and would give you a more realistic perspective.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    Same tired, cliche replies as usual ... you're probably also assuming that my opinions aren't based on job experience, yet they are based on several years of experience in many positions, where I did the 40-hour grind, delivered business solutions for months-long and years-long projects, etc. I'm not talking about academic overqualification. I'm talking about someone hiring you, talking at length about how you are being hired specifically to do X because it matters to the company's bottom line, and then after you're hired they switch it and say actually you're going to do Y but you're going to be a political mouthpiece for X. One common set of values is Y = statistically invalid model fitting that actively causes the business to lose money but which is easier to reduce to pliable metrics for political jockeying X = (deep) machine learning and/or Bayesian stats It's not at all about academic overqualification. The actual business need, for reals, can benefit from the pragmatic and cost-effective use of the tools, and the person is actually skilled in using to do exactly that. Yet, they are prevented politically. As for starting a company, I think I would guess that's one of the least plausible ways of doing important or useful work. You'll only get funding if it is a trite variation on consumer bullshit -- even though consumers themselves don't want that and would rather that your labor is allocated to solving more fundamentally important social problems that there just isn't money for solving. Plus, you'll be so burnt out over all the auxiliary stuff like HR, marketing, sales, that you won't actually do any of the underlying quant work that was the whole reason for starting the company in the first place. It kills me how people here seem to think that "start your own company" is some kind of "put up or shut up" gauntlet to throw down to challenge someone who is lamenting the shitty state that things are in. "Start your own company" is not some venerated challenge-call for those brave few who want to change the world. Starting your own company is just a different format of the same bullshit phenomenon. Fixing what's broken inside of companies and organizations that already have huge leverage and capital to positively impact fundamentally important problems -- that is perhaps worthwhile, if you can manage to deal with the political fighting without getting too burned out.

untilHellbanned 10y ago

Serious analysis irony here - your anecdote doesn't reverse the mountain of data in the other direction.

p4wnc6 10y ago

Saying "MATLAB is for other people" isn't the sign of a poor candidate. Saying "you will need to use MATLAB for this job" on the other hand is overwhelmingly a sign of a bad job, in the same way that any usage of Excel VBA whatsoever is a sign to run, run, run for the hills -- that firm is absolutely doing it wrong. I've also heard the opposite of your first example used as a criticism of candidates too. After completing my undergrad degree in math and then grad degrees in statistics, I was astounded how in industry, either describing yourself more as an engineer or scientist who does not work on the abstract math stuff or describing yourself as someone who is very interested in abstract math will both cause you to get rejected. The only way to win is to happen to have done a lot of difficult abstract math in the past and remember it all well enough to pass tricky interviews, but then to be overwhelmingly happy and satisfied with a job that will not ever ask you to use it and will instead burn you out on dumb shit stuff like fitting a regression to KPI data and using t-stats to directly do (fallacious) model comparison. The biggest career risk I've seen from having done very computer science-heavy statistics is underemployment. Your math chops will be pure credential, sometimes used by your manager to try to win arguments from authority about e.g. that dumb shit KPI regression. But you will 100% never be given open-ended modeling work that could actually have a positive impact on your business's bottom line. Essentially, you are hired to be some more senior person's sycophant political darling. You function internally much the same way that a big consulting company functions externally -- people already know what they want to hear, they just want you to tell them what they want to hear, slap together some plausible-sounding rationalizations for it, dress it up with buzzwords about big data and "insights", and be a show pony for talking about it. They emphatically do not want you for doing anything that would be called "real" work. There are occasional exceptions, especially in certain teams at certain established tech companies. But then, landing a position inside one of those teams is nothing but the same lottery as winning a professorship all over again.

nradov 10y ago
Welcome to the real world of being an employee. It's common in every field for new employees to be academically overqualified and think their bosses are incompetent and irrational. If you don't like it then try starting your own company. I'm not being flippant; that's a serious suggestion and would give you a more realistic perspective.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Same tired, cliche replies as usual ... you're probably also assuming that my opinions aren't based on job experience, yet they are based on several years of experience in many positions, where I did the 40-hour grind, delivered business solutions for months-long and years-long projects, etc. I'm not talking about academic overqualification. I'm talking about someone hiring you, talking at length about how you are being hired specifically to do X because it matters to the company's bottom line, and then after you're hired they switch it and say actually you're going to do Y but you're going to be a political mouthpiece for X. One common set of values is Y = statistically invalid model fitting that actively causes the business to lose money but which is easier to reduce to pliable metrics for political jockeying X = (deep) machine learning and/or Bayesian stats It's not at all about academic overqualification. The actual business need, for reals, can benefit from the pragmatic and cost-effective use of the tools, and the person is actually skilled in using to do exactly that. Yet, they are prevented politically. As for starting a company, I think I would guess that's one of the least plausible ways of doing important or useful work. You'll only get funding if it is a trite variation on consumer bullshit -- even though consumers themselves don't want that and would rather that your labor is allocated to solving more fundamentally important social problems that there just isn't money for solving. Plus, you'll be so burnt out over all the auxiliary stuff like HR, marketing, sales, that you won't actually do any of the underlying quant work that was the whole reason for starting the company in the first place. It kills me how people here seem to think that "start your own company" is some kind of "put up or shut up" gauntlet to throw down to challenge someone who is lamenting the shitty state that things are in. "Start your own company" is not some venerated challenge-call for those brave few who want to change the world. Starting your own company is just a different format of the same bullshit phenomenon. Fixing what's broken inside of companies and organizations that already have huge leverage and capital to positively impact fundamentally important problems -- that is perhaps worthwhile, if you can manage to deal with the political fighting without getting too burned out.