> But you definitely do not need to be a doctor, or even have PhDs on staff to make companies or products that are material relevant to people's wellbeing or fi

> But you definitely do not need to be a doctor, or even have PhDs on staff to make companies or products that are material relevant to people's wellbeing or fitness. Again, research labs are not hiring people to build products. They are not even hiring people to do advanced development in most cases (and when they do, those supporting engineer roles typically don't require phds). They are hiring people to do heavy-R research. > We're talking about the value of Phd's to high tech companies, so it's relevant. No, we are talking about whether these companies should hire phds into their already existing research labs. Not even generally, but specifically (e.g., Intel Labs and Amazon). The decision that these labs should do heavy-R research was already made for us by VPs or C-level folks. These labs already exist, their mandate is already spelled out, and now the question is "why won't they hire me to execute on that mandate?" If parent disagrees with that mandate, why would he be interested in getting a job in one of these labs? The question of whether these places should have heavy-R research labs in the first place is entirely orthogonal to this thread. Why? Because parent already stated he wants to work within these existing research organizations. It sounds like you think typical industrial research labs are bad investments. That's fine. I disagree. More importantly, presumably, the parent commenter disagrees. After all, if he did agree with you, why the hell would he want to work in an R&D lab? If parent agreed with you, why the hell would he be pining for a job in one of these labs? He wouldn't. He would just apply to YC. So, again, litigating whether or not these heavy-R research labs should exist in the first place is an important topic but is not relevant to this thread, which is about the question: "why don't research orgs that have a corporate mandate to do heavy-R research hire non-phds?". Extremely off-topic, as I've stated multiple times now, but maybe it will help: YC has HARC and (indirectly) OpenAI. Those are much more analogous to corporate research labs than YC investments. Are they wastes of money? Good question; but one thing is certain: if you think so, then you probably don't want a job at one :-)