11 ms·

Why is PhD valued so much for engaging in R&D? Pretty much any labs (Intel labs, Amazon Lab126, etc) require PhD. What is objectively beneficial for having a Ph

Why is PhD valued so much for engaging in R&D? Pretty much any labs (Intel labs, Amazon Lab126, etc) require PhD. What is objectively beneficial for having a PhD in doing R&D? Is it the ability to conduct research - methods, process, analysis, discipline? Or is it the fact that they have knowledge in that particular field? Every time I speak to someone with a PhD at work (I work in top 10 tech companies in US), in 100% of the cases in my experience do not engage in anything related to their thesis. So why is there this arbitrary blockade for having a PhD in R&D/Labs?

Retric 8y ago
Getting a PhD is mostly about doing research. So, it's directly relevant.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  I’d like to do research but it’s impossible to get into these labs because having a PhD is an absolute non-negotiable requirement.
  - jefft255 8y ago
    It is not "absolute" as you say, you can get in most research lab with a MS if you are an exceptional candidate. My advice, if you really, really want to be a scientist in a major research lab, is to just bite the bullet and do a PhD.
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    You don’t just “do research” (nowadays) without having had training, which is precisely the point of a PhDd
  - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
    a) it's not absolute b) you could apply to phd programs and get a phd. But yes, it's impossible to get into R&D labs if you've never done research. You can self-teach and publish in top conferences on your own (this is probably much harder than you think it is but is not impossible!), or you can defer income to get an education from one of the many structured educational programs designed to teach you how to do research. I'm not sure why you expect industry R&D labs (as a researcher, that is) to hire people who do not already know how to do the job. They are companies, not guilds or universities. Software Engineering positions certainly require people to already know how to program, after all. How is this any different?
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> Is it the ability to conduct research - methods, process, analysis, discipline? I think this is largely the reason, that a PhD is seen as a semi-reliable guide to general research ability, though of course it's neither necessary nor sufficient, but there is a rough correlation.
- fermienrico 8y ago
  I wonder if this could be taught as a 6 month course instead of having to grind through 4+ years of your life researching something obscure impractical and largely driven by funding incentives. I feel like teaching research methods would be way more efficient - just without the experience. But we hire BS/MS engineers all the time without industry experience, so why would’nt having a research focus Masters not be sufficient?
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    Maybe. Assuming it's a research-focussed MA. Still, the problem is that research needs to be on something, and so they do also need to acquire knowledge at the same time (otherwise they're likely to be a glorified lab tech), so the things an MA can generally tackle are different from those a PhD can tackle. That said, our department sends MAs into industry as well. Further our department as well as our University has been promoting undergraduates getting hands-on experience in doing research.
  - badpun 8y ago
    > I wonder if this could be taught as a 6 month course instead of having to grind through 4+ years of your life researching something obscure impractical and largely driven by funding incentives. 4+ years of PhD (incl. a track record of solid publications) prove that you have the intellect, motivation and discipline to pull off a multi-year research project, similar to the ones employers expect you to work on when they hire you. It seems like an excellent filter for a research job.
blueadept111 8y ago
For the same reason there's an arbitrary blockade against awarding a phD to someone with no formal training from a university.
marmaduke 8y ago
> in 100% of the cases in my experience do not engage in anything related to their thesis This is missing the point of a PhD, which is to develop a capacity for doing science (or more generally hard thinking in relevant domain). Most of my colleagues in neuroscience are physicists
- stochastician 8y ago
  Exactly this; this is also why people with multiple PhDs are incredibly rare (and viewed as odd ducks). The expectation is you've been trained to do "science" if you have a PhD, and thus a second one is redundant.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Exactly. I have met plenty of PhDs that have switched fields from Physics to biology for example.
  - brainpool 8y ago
    Spot on. Note also that the person taking on that second PhD took up a spot that could have been useful for someone else. Odd duck indeed.
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    I hadn’t thought about the multi PhD case.. I’ve never met one. I’d expect someone to do a post doc even if it’s far afield from their PhD.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >This is missing the point of a PhD, which is to develop a capacity for doing science (or more generally hard thinking in relevant domain) These days, it is more about the ability to publish. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is wrapping up his PhD. He pointed out that not one of his colleagues is concerned whether anyone can reproduce their work. They use a home grown simulation suite which only they have access to, and is constantly being updated with the worst software practices you can think of. No one in their team believes that the tool will give the same results they did 4 years ago. The troubling part is, no one sees that as being a problem. They got their papers published, and so the SW did its job. (Should not be surprising to anyone who spends a lot of time in engineering PhD programs).
whatshisface 8y ago
Because having a PhD is proof that you can do research, and there are so many PhDs available that Intel has absolutely no motivation to increase their hiring risk one iota by extending their net past that market. Even if a BA was only 0.000001% less likely to pan out than a PhD it would not be worth it. The only way this could change would be if the number of PhDs available to Intel was drastically reduced, which might happen if the president gets his way with immigration, or if the now commonly repeated message "getting a PhD will not be worth ten years when measured by career progress" sinks in to US students.
- cwyers 8y ago
  Given the salary difference between the two on average, if the BA was five nines as likely to be as good as the PhD you'd hire two of the BAs and you'd make out like gangbusters.
  - UncleMeat 8y ago
    What salary difference? At most of the majors, PhDs are paid roughly equivalent to somebody with just a few years of industry experience.
- gaius 8y ago
  Because having a PhD is proof that you can do research, and there are so many PhDs available that Intel has absolutely no motivation to increase their hiring risk one iota by extending their net past that market. Even if a BA was only 0.000001% less likely to pan out than a PhD it would not be worth it. There's such a shortage of STEM graduates that PhDs get hired to do stuff you can actually do with a MOOC (or to carry a pager at Google).
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    I know way too many unemployed physicists to believe for one second that there is a shortage of STEM graduates. The shortage must be of some other trait or skill.
chriskanan 8y ago
A PhD is a degree in doing R&D, with an emphasis on the R. A thesis is just a demonstration that this set of skills was acquired in a discipline. Just like how people check out your GitHub repository to see if you are a capable coder, people check out your refereed publication record to determine if you can do research. It's possible to build up a record of publications without a PhD, but it is a hard skill to acquire on your own.
- riskneutral 8y ago
  Most PhDs are all R and no D. And you don’t necessarily need to build up a record of publications to do real world R&D outside of academia. In my experience having a PhD is just a crude filter for employers, because what else are you going to rely on? But unless the PhD thesis was in the exact same area as the real world R&D (quite rare), you can assume that a newly minted PhD will not be hitting the ground running.
  - thrmsforbfast 8y ago
    Sure, but parent is talking specifically about heavy-R research labs (he mentions Intel labs, Amazon Lab126, etc), not more D-oriented data science or ML positions.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  A lot of successful researchers lack phds, some of them are considered at the top of the ML field. It isn’t really hard to acquire on your own, you just have to spend time at it (the main advanatage of doing a PhD is time and mentorship).
DrNuke 8y ago
A PhD is meant to give you the discipline you need to read literature properly, write your own proposal to expand the knowledge in your niche, devise and follow a sound protocol to test your hypotheses, execute experiments and simulations keeping sensitivity at bay, discuss your results against your own hypothesis and the accepted wisdom in your field. You do not need a PhD to do research, many advancements are even originated from non-PhD researchers, but you probably need a PhD to function properly in a rigid research environment.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  This is a good answer. I say this because most applied research is not done in a manner that would meed any kind of academic standards. When you look at this history of the Valley, it has more to do with dropouts than PhDs - rather, it has more to do with 'those doing' than 'getting credentials'. I almost feel that for the most part PhDs belong in Academia, and that whatever high-end work we do in industry should be called something else.
thrmsforbfast 8y ago
My sibling comments miss something important: people actually do something for those 5+ years. They don't just sit on their hands. They're publishing papers, collaborating with respected researchers, building a personal network/reputation, developing new tools and techniques, writing peer reviews, contributing to grant proposals, giving talks, teaching, etc. I.e., they are actually doing the exact job that they are now being hired to do. > Is it the ability to conduct research - methods, process, analysis, discipline? Or is it the fact that they have knowledge in that particular field? When you apply to R&D labs, you are competing against people who spent at least five years: * building research infrastructure (which includes, but is not limited to, knowledge about "methods, process, analysis, discipline"), * a concrete track record of producing publishable research, * a professional network and some amount of respect for you previous research output, and * experience designing a multi-year research project (from writing/helping write a convincing proposal all the way through publishing, evangelizing, and managing relationships with people who want to build on your work). Do you have 5+ first author publications in good conferences? Have you contributed to R&D software? Do you have multiple influential collaborators who have a high opinion of you and are likely to help popularize/contribute to/build upon your research goals? Have you written and followed through on grant proposals? If "yes" to all those things, you should apply for these research positions! Even without a phd, you are a good candidate. If all you have is a six month MOOC, or some R&D software development but no experience with the full research process, then sorry, but there are people with who have already demonstrated they can successfully design and execute on research agendas. You might still be a good candidate, but preferring strictly more experienced and better qualified candidates who have demonstrated, empirically, that they can perform the full job, is not an "arbitrary blockade". > Every time I speak to someone with a PhD at work (I work in top 10 tech companies in US), in 100% of the cases in my experience do not engage in anything related to their thesis. "people I have worked with" is a huge selection bias. IME, in CS this is almost always either a) not true, or b) a conscious choice on the part of the phd holder (and is more of a pivot than a "totally unrelated thing"; you just might not see that there's a deep connection between the thing that the person was doing before and what they're doing now).
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Tell us the name of the PhD research groups that were critical in the success of Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Uber, Oracle, Salesforce, Apple, Google (Page Rank is a simple idea, not rocket science)? Maybe Intel, but then there are arguments there as well. The kinds of 'R' that PhD's are trained to do is fairly academic and pure. It takes so long for that research to meet applied reality in the competitive sense. I know that Google has made some improvements with voice recognition etc. but it's not hugely material, it hasn't changed their business one bit. I can't even think of a single important startup these days that was founded on key research. Of course these people are important, and fairly pure 'R' is important, but the world is far, far more applied than most people like to think. The kinds of 'professional' aspects you describe simply aren't necessary in most scenarios. Also - remember that a lot of what researchers churn out isn't necessarily valuable, a lot of the results are not reproducible, and that 'publishing, giving talks, having a network' are not in and of themselves hyper relevant to making progress. In many ways I feel that PhD's are to 'applied R&D' what 'MBA's' are to business - it's all very academic :)
rocketflumes 8y ago
A PhD is not only about solving some specific problem. It is more about learning how to solve problems, and more importantly, choosing what problems to solve. Having a PhD should mean that the person is capable of making consistent progress in ill-defined problems without much external support. Of course not all PhDs can do this, and you don't need a PhD to gain these skills, but they correlate strongly enough that it makes sense to just filter some jobs by whether or not someone has a PhD.
sytelus 8y ago
There is a significant difference the way a person with PhD approaches unsolved problems vs a person without PhD. A person with PhD will typically like to invest huge chunk of time to digest much of the prior art. They want to systematically understand what worked and what didn't in the past. They then bring in their unique understanding of small set of techniques/cross-domain expertise to combine with prior art to attack the problem. It is important for them to craft well designed experiments and lean on tools like mathematics to guide their next steps. Their goal is to make sure anonymous reviewers of their work are satisfied with proof they present of their hypothesis. A person without PhD typically doesn't want to take a lot of time going through years worth of prior art. Their approach usually boils down to developing intuition via initial random search and then iterative experiments to strengthen intuition. If this doesn't work out over a period of time, they will probably want to move on to something else instead of keep creating next little insignificant bump of progress. The frame of mind is get to near-instant gratification as opposed to possibly spending all of your life in to something that wouldn't make any impact in real world but might build useful steps for future generations. It is hard to say one approach is better than other for all classes of problem. However using the first approach requires certain training, rigor, discipline and, most importantly, frame of mind - we call PhD. It is only recently and in few fields like AI that research careers have become desirable from financial perspective. However in most of the fields, things are very different and you would rarely see anyone demanding to be theoretical mathematician or quantum physicist, for example, without a relevant PhD while also receiving modest income with no promotions or stock options. However, it has become clear that for many advanced problems the random search approach typically maxes out quickly because search space becomes prohibitively large and developing correct intuitions requires climbing knowledge pyramids of epic proportions. For example, invention of transistors, GPS or techniques like initialization or dropout in deep learning wouldn't have been possible without PhD style multi-generation approach and concrete mathematical understanding. Having said that, I'm against hard liners who create rules that being researcher requires PhD and one without it cannot innovate or do creative work. Many complex and most valuable innovations have been done by non-PhDs such as Faraday, Edison and Wright Brothers - interestingly in all of these cases people with academic degrees gloriously failed working on same turf, for longer time and better funding (Davy, Langley etc).

Retric 8y ago

Getting a PhD is mostly about doing research. So, it's directly relevant.

fermienrico 8y ago
I’d like to do research but it’s impossible to get into these labs because having a PhD is an absolute non-negotiable requirement.
- jefft255 8y ago
  It is not "absolute" as you say, you can get in most research lab with a MS if you are an exceptional candidate. My advice, if you really, really want to be a scientist in a major research lab, is to just bite the bullet and do a PhD.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  You don’t just “do research” (nowadays) without having had training, which is precisely the point of a PhDd
- thrmsforbfast 8y ago
  a) it's not absolute b) you could apply to phd programs and get a phd. But yes, it's impossible to get into R&D labs if you've never done research. You can self-teach and publish in top conferences on your own (this is probably much harder than you think it is but is not impossible!), or you can defer income to get an education from one of the many structured educational programs designed to teach you how to do research. I'm not sure why you expect industry R&D labs (as a researcher, that is) to hire people who do not already know how to do the job. They are companies, not guilds or universities. Software Engineering positions certainly require people to already know how to program, after all. How is this any different?

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

> Is it the ability to conduct research - methods, process, analysis, discipline? I think this is largely the reason, that a PhD is seen as a semi-reliable guide to general research ability, though of course it's neither necessary nor sufficient, but there is a rough correlation.

fermienrico 8y ago
I wonder if this could be taught as a 6 month course instead of having to grind through 4+ years of your life researching something obscure impractical and largely driven by funding incentives. I feel like teaching research methods would be way more efficient - just without the experience. But we hire BS/MS engineers all the time without industry experience, so why would’nt having a research focus Masters not be sufficient?
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Maybe. Assuming it's a research-focussed MA. Still, the problem is that research needs to be on something, and so they do also need to acquire knowledge at the same time (otherwise they're likely to be a glorified lab tech), so the things an MA can generally tackle are different from those a PhD can tackle. That said, our department sends MAs into industry as well. Further our department as well as our University has been promoting undergraduates getting hands-on experience in doing research.
- badpun 8y ago
  > I wonder if this could be taught as a 6 month course instead of having to grind through 4+ years of your life researching something obscure impractical and largely driven by funding incentives. 4+ years of PhD (incl. a track record of solid publications) prove that you have the intellect, motivation and discipline to pull off a multi-year research project, similar to the ones employers expect you to work on when they hire you. It seems like an excellent filter for a research job.

blueadept111 8y ago

For the same reason there's an arbitrary blockade against awarding a phD to someone with no formal training from a university.

marmaduke 8y ago

> in 100% of the cases in my experience do not engage in anything related to their thesis This is missing the point of a PhD, which is to develop a capacity for doing science (or more generally hard thinking in relevant domain). Most of my colleagues in neuroscience are physicists

stochastician 8y ago
Exactly this; this is also why people with multiple PhDs are incredibly rare (and viewed as odd ducks). The expectation is you've been trained to do "science" if you have a PhD, and thus a second one is redundant.
- collyw 8y ago
  Exactly. I have met plenty of PhDs that have switched fields from Physics to biology for example.
- brainpool 8y ago
  Spot on. Note also that the person taking on that second PhD took up a spot that could have been useful for someone else. Odd duck indeed.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  I hadn’t thought about the multi PhD case.. I’ve never met one. I’d expect someone to do a post doc even if it’s far afield from their PhD.
BeetleB 8y ago
>This is missing the point of a PhD, which is to develop a capacity for doing science (or more generally hard thinking in relevant domain) These days, it is more about the ability to publish. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is wrapping up his PhD. He pointed out that not one of his colleagues is concerned whether anyone can reproduce their work. They use a home grown simulation suite which only they have access to, and is constantly being updated with the worst software practices you can think of. No one in their team believes that the tool will give the same results they did 4 years ago. The troubling part is, no one sees that as being a problem. They got their papers published, and so the SW did its job. (Should not be surprising to anyone who spends a lot of time in engineering PhD programs).

whatshisface 8y ago

Because having a PhD is proof that you can do research, and there are so many PhDs available that Intel has absolutely no motivation to increase their hiring risk one iota by extending their net past that market. Even if a BA was only 0.000001% less likely to pan out than a PhD it would not be worth it. The only way this could change would be if the number of PhDs available to Intel was drastically reduced, which might happen if the president gets his way with immigration, or if the now commonly repeated message "getting a PhD will not be worth ten years when measured by career progress" sinks in to US students.

cwyers 8y ago
Given the salary difference between the two on average, if the BA was five nines as likely to be as good as the PhD you'd hire two of the BAs and you'd make out like gangbusters.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  What salary difference? At most of the majors, PhDs are paid roughly equivalent to somebody with just a few years of industry experience.
gaius 8y ago
Because having a PhD is proof that you can do research, and there are so many PhDs available that Intel has absolutely no motivation to increase their hiring risk one iota by extending their net past that market. Even if a BA was only 0.000001% less likely to pan out than a PhD it would not be worth it. There's such a shortage of STEM graduates that PhDs get hired to do stuff you can actually do with a MOOC (or to carry a pager at Google).
- whatshisface 8y ago
  I know way too many unemployed physicists to believe for one second that there is a shortage of STEM graduates. The shortage must be of some other trait or skill.

chriskanan 8y ago

A PhD is a degree in doing R&D, with an emphasis on the R. A thesis is just a demonstration that this set of skills was acquired in a discipline. Just like how people check out your GitHub repository to see if you are a capable coder, people check out your refereed publication record to determine if you can do research. It's possible to build up a record of publications without a PhD, but it is a hard skill to acquire on your own.

riskneutral 8y ago
Most PhDs are all R and no D. And you don’t necessarily need to build up a record of publications to do real world R&D outside of academia. In my experience having a PhD is just a crude filter for employers, because what else are you going to rely on? But unless the PhD thesis was in the exact same area as the real world R&D (quite rare), you can assume that a newly minted PhD will not be hitting the ground running.
- thrmsforbfast 8y ago
  Sure, but parent is talking specifically about heavy-R research labs (he mentions Intel labs, Amazon Lab126, etc), not more D-oriented data science or ML positions.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
A lot of successful researchers lack phds, some of them are considered at the top of the ML field. It isn’t really hard to acquire on your own, you just have to spend time at it (the main advanatage of doing a PhD is time and mentorship).

DrNuke 8y ago

A PhD is meant to give you the discipline you need to read literature properly, write your own proposal to expand the knowledge in your niche, devise and follow a sound protocol to test your hypotheses, execute experiments and simulations keeping sensitivity at bay, discuss your results against your own hypothesis and the accepted wisdom in your field. You do not need a PhD to do research, many advancements are even originated from non-PhD researchers, but you probably need a PhD to function properly in a rigid research environment.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is a good answer. I say this because most applied research is not done in a manner that would meed any kind of academic standards. When you look at this history of the Valley, it has more to do with dropouts than PhDs - rather, it has more to do with 'those doing' than 'getting credentials'. I almost feel that for the most part PhDs belong in Academia, and that whatever high-end work we do in industry should be called something else.

thrmsforbfast 8y ago

My sibling comments miss something important: people actually do something for those 5+ years. They don't just sit on their hands. They're publishing papers, collaborating with respected researchers, building a personal network/reputation, developing new tools and techniques, writing peer reviews, contributing to grant proposals, giving talks, teaching, etc. I.e., they are actually doing the exact job that they are now being hired to do. > Is it the ability to conduct research - methods, process, analysis, discipline? Or is it the fact that they have knowledge in that particular field? When you apply to R&D labs, you are competing against people who spent at least five years: * building research infrastructure (which includes, but is not limited to, knowledge about "methods, process, analysis, discipline"), * a concrete track record of producing publishable research, * a professional network and some amount of respect for you previous research output, and * experience designing a multi-year research project (from writing/helping write a convincing proposal all the way through publishing, evangelizing, and managing relationships with people who want to build on your work). Do you have 5+ first author publications in good conferences? Have you contributed to R&D software? Do you have multiple influential collaborators who have a high opinion of you and are likely to help popularize/contribute to/build upon your research goals? Have you written and followed through on grant proposals? If "yes" to all those things, you should apply for these research positions! Even without a phd, you are a good candidate. If all you have is a six month MOOC, or some R&D software development but no experience with the full research process, then sorry, but there are people with who have already demonstrated they can successfully design and execute on research agendas. You might still be a good candidate, but preferring strictly more experienced and better qualified candidates who have demonstrated, empirically, that they can perform the full job, is not an "arbitrary blockade". > Every time I speak to someone with a PhD at work (I work in top 10 tech companies in US), in 100% of the cases in my experience do not engage in anything related to their thesis. "people I have worked with" is a huge selection bias. IME, in CS this is almost always either a) not true, or b) a conscious choice on the part of the phd holder (and is more of a pivot than a "totally unrelated thing"; you just might not see that there's a deep connection between the thing that the person was doing before and what they're doing now).

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Tell us the name of the PhD research groups that were critical in the success of Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Uber, Oracle, Salesforce, Apple, Google (Page Rank is a simple idea, not rocket science)? Maybe Intel, but then there are arguments there as well. The kinds of 'R' that PhD's are trained to do is fairly academic and pure. It takes so long for that research to meet applied reality in the competitive sense. I know that Google has made some improvements with voice recognition etc. but it's not hugely material, it hasn't changed their business one bit. I can't even think of a single important startup these days that was founded on key research. Of course these people are important, and fairly pure 'R' is important, but the world is far, far more applied than most people like to think. The kinds of 'professional' aspects you describe simply aren't necessary in most scenarios. Also - remember that a lot of what researchers churn out isn't necessarily valuable, a lot of the results are not reproducible, and that 'publishing, giving talks, having a network' are not in and of themselves hyper relevant to making progress. In many ways I feel that PhD's are to 'applied R&D' what 'MBA's' are to business - it's all very academic :)

rocketflumes 8y ago

A PhD is not only about solving some specific problem. It is more about learning how to solve problems, and more importantly, choosing what problems to solve. Having a PhD should mean that the person is capable of making consistent progress in ill-defined problems without much external support. Of course not all PhDs can do this, and you don't need a PhD to gain these skills, but they correlate strongly enough that it makes sense to just filter some jobs by whether or not someone has a PhD.

sytelus 8y ago

There is a significant difference the way a person with PhD approaches unsolved problems vs a person without PhD. A person with PhD will typically like to invest huge chunk of time to digest much of the prior art. They want to systematically understand what worked and what didn't in the past. They then bring in their unique understanding of small set of techniques/cross-domain expertise to combine with prior art to attack the problem. It is important for them to craft well designed experiments and lean on tools like mathematics to guide their next steps. Their goal is to make sure anonymous reviewers of their work are satisfied with proof they present of their hypothesis. A person without PhD typically doesn't want to take a lot of time going through years worth of prior art. Their approach usually boils down to developing intuition via initial random search and then iterative experiments to strengthen intuition. If this doesn't work out over a period of time, they will probably want to move on to something else instead of keep creating next little insignificant bump of progress. The frame of mind is get to near-instant gratification as opposed to possibly spending all of your life in to something that wouldn't make any impact in real world but might build useful steps for future generations. It is hard to say one approach is better than other for all classes of problem. However using the first approach requires certain training, rigor, discipline and, most importantly, frame of mind - we call PhD. It is only recently and in few fields like AI that research careers have become desirable from financial perspective. However in most of the fields, things are very different and you would rarely see anyone demanding to be theoretical mathematician or quantum physicist, for example, without a relevant PhD while also receiving modest income with no promotions or stock options. However, it has become clear that for many advanced problems the random search approach typically maxes out quickly because search space becomes prohibitively large and developing correct intuitions requires climbing knowledge pyramids of epic proportions. For example, invention of transistors, GPS or techniques like initialization or dropout in deep learning wouldn't have been possible without PhD style multi-generation approach and concrete mathematical understanding. Having said that, I'm against hard liners who create rules that being researcher requires PhD and one without it cannot innovate or do creative work. Many complex and most valuable innovations have been done by non-PhDs such as Faraday, Edison and Wright Brothers - interestingly in all of these cases people with academic degrees gloriously failed working on same turf, for longer time and better funding (Davy, Langley etc).