Interviewer here. Apologies for the tone, totally not intended. The true intend was to help PhDs be more prepared, not to express smugness. Here are some detai

Interviewer here. Apologies for the tone, totally not intended. The true intend was to help PhDs be more prepared, not to express smugness. Here are some details that were cut out of the post: - we have an extensive engineering interview process, typically 3-4 sessions. First chat, tech screen, take home assignment, and half day hackathon with a few engineers - sometimes we do the initial chat and tech screen together so we had a 40 min chat, and 20 min simple tech screen in this case - proposed of simple tech screen is to decide if this person knows basic coding/problem solving (eg Josephus problem) - goal is not to write code on the white board, but rather talk and discuss approach, general problem solving This candidate was specialized in OR, so we asked an optimization related question (given an array of products and prices, how to spend all your money exactly). Instead of a discussion, the candidate dove into writing mathematical proofs, and after framing the goal of the exercise and a few hints, he ended up writing a 10-level deeply nested for loop... Obviously I'm not trying to make generalizations, but I've interviewed over 100 candidates in my career, and there is a strong negative correlation with PhDs in particular, hence the article. Understandably, because they are trained in other methods, typically unsuitable to startups, as others have commented. But if they want to get into startups, I hope these tips would help.