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Very few jobs require PhDs. Tech most certainly doesn't. I've been in this industry across three decades now, and by far the most talented people I've worked fo

• black-tea 8y ago
  I have a PhD and completely agree with you. I did a PhD because back then working in software wasn't attractive to me (open source was not normal and Linux was seen as this weird geek think). But it set my career back a good few years really.
  • stirfrykitty 8y ago
    And if you ever get to a point where you are financially secure yet want a non-stressful job, you could always teach something like Yearbook at a HS. I know a guy who did this. He cashed out of his IT job after making almost a million. He wife is a nurse. He got tired of the burnout, on-call rotation, and got his teaching certificate, got hired at a high school teaching Yearbook creation and media. He's off 3 months of the year, gets paid for 12, and is living the easy life. He works from 0730-1530 daily, no nights, no weekends, no tests to grade, no stupid standardization tests, nothing. Literally easy street.
    • coliveira 8y ago
      There is no teaching job that pays for 12 months. All HS jobs for teaching pay only for the months you teach. What some schools do is to spread out the payments through the year, but the pay is the same.
      • stirfrykitty 8y ago
        That's what was meant. You can take the 9 or 12 month option. No one takes the 9 month option. I spent 5 years working for schools. I took the 12 month option. But the time off is fantastic. Nothing like the look on my wife's face when I'm not getting out of bed for three months to go slog. I miss the time off.
    • black-tea 8y ago
      What does "teaching Yearbook" mean?
      • stirfrykitty 8y ago
        Most high schools have a Yearbook program lead by a certified teacher. That teacher does nothing but ensure photos/video are taken, gathered, and compiled in the form of a Yearbook, which is sold to the students. The classes are focused on learning photography, video, editing of the results. There is a tangible evidence book at the end of it. Kids love it. That teacher deals with kids who WANT to be in that class, so everyone is having fun. Skills are learned. Everyone goes home happy.
  • IshKebab 8y ago
    Yeah I'm the same. I did a PhD because I originally wanted to do engineering (real engineering), but ended up in software anyway because the pay is just insanely better and it's easier work. I definitely could got where I am without the PhD. Hell I wouldn't have needed the engineering degree either and I'd be pretty rich by now, but I don't regret doing the degree because I learnt loads and had fun doing uni things.
• jimmaswell 8y ago
  That's fine most of the time but Google etc. are going to want a few PhD's in graph theory, AI, number theory, etc
  • DeonPenny 8y ago
    Even in the case of google I know most of the people working in their AI program I know personally don't have an MS or PHD. As long as you can understand the work it's fine.
    • ylmm 8y ago
      Sure, but what do they do? Looking at Google Brain for example, "research scientists" are exclusively people with doctorates, while "engineers" only require an MS or BS/BA. The work is totally different; they're not substitutes.
      • HeavenFox 8y ago
        I am not sure about Google, but when I was at Facebook, any Software Engineer with PhD can opt to use title Research Scientist instead. The purpose is mostly to make Green Card application easier.
        • ylmm 8y ago
          Oh that's so clever aha. When some people FB Core Data Science came to campus, they made it pretty clear that they were looking for people with doctoral training for their research work (and not, for example, a Master's graduate who completed PhD-level coursework), so I guess it depends on the task/team.
        • skj 8y ago
          At Google, Research Scientist and Software Engineer are different job ladders.
• JamesBarney 8y ago
  I've thought about this before because I've found the same thing. I think it's caused by an over reliance on education as a signal. If you have a stack of resumes you're likely to interview everyone with a PhD, but only the ones with the most stellar github profile if they have no formal education. During the interview if the PhD says something silly you'll probably disregard it. But the person without a formal education needs to be on point. These and other filters means that a mediocre PhD can get through the hiring gauntlet but only the most kick ass high school graduates can make it through.
  • stirfrykitty 8y ago
    This ^, and also most HR drones don't know how to properly vet tech candidates. They get a set of vague "wants" from hiring managers and if they see anything worded differently, they balk. I've had to personally talk with HR over the years to get them to realize that RedHat, for example, is Linux, it's not its own thing. Ditto the lazy coding candidates that list JS instead of the proper JavaScript. Let's not even get into HR deciphering stuff like Jenkins, Nomad, linting software, or other tools. They see that stuff and their eyes go all glassy. My mentor long ago likened these people to Eloi and the IT grunts to Morlocks. I cannot say I disagree.
    • throwawaymath 8y ago
      > My mentor long ago likened these people to Eloi and the IT grunts to Morlocks. I cannot say I disagree. Everyone is the hero of their own story. It sounds like your mentor is arrogant, and could use more intellectual humility.
      • NullPrefix 8y ago
        Haven't read the book, but ... >By the year AD 802,701, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi. Please explain how is this arrogant?
• JonathonW 8y ago
  As someone who went through grad school in CS, I don't regret my Master's-- in large part because it led me directly into the job I'm in today, which I enjoy (a startup devoted to commercializing tech developed in the research group where I was working in grad school). I also don't regret dropping out of the program before finishing my PhD. After I finished my Master's and started pushing towards the PhD, I came to the realization that what I really wanted to do was just to build cool things, not spend my life in the publish-or-perish cycle of academia. So I stopped with my Master's, took a full-time staff position doing more-or-less exactly the same thing I was doing in my Research Assistantship except for a lot more money, and moved on with my life. And eventually got recruited to where I am now.
• tathougies 8y ago
  I mean it really depends on what kind of tech you're doing. Tech is not just *nix, javascript, python and phone apps. If you're working on chip verification and formal methods, as some people I know are, then a PhD is a huge boon. These are rapidly developing and in some sense still emerging fields with lots of money to be made (especially in the arena of defense, medtech, etc). They are not your 'typical' valley fodder of mindless web apps, 'machine learning', I'll give you that. But they are tech nonetheless (and actually really cool, underappreciated tech in my opinion).
  • deepnotderp 8y ago
    I found it hilarious that chip verification was your number 1 example. As an end user of such tools, I dearly wish that more people of the "valley fodder" variety joined the field. From week long install processes to loads of crashes during use, this is not a good example of a PhD only success story field.
    • NullPrefix 8y ago
      >From week long install processes to loads of crashes during use, this is not a good example of a PhD only success story field. Clearly, npm ecosystem is a better outcome.
      • chillacy 8y ago
        Actually you'll laugh but npm has pretty decent DX (developer experience), especially compared with most chip design tools I've used (which only run on windows and crash a lot).
        • tnecniv 8y ago
          I still have nightmares about Xilinx FPGA tools.
• rhizome 8y ago
  In this light, I would recast the story as an addiction to overqualified candidates. I think there's also a parallel (if not multiplying) force here, in postgraduates wanting to be paid more than $20K/yr as an adjunct.
• georgeburdell 8y ago
  Do you have a PhD? Your post reeks of statistical sample bias. You don’t work for/with unqualified HS and AS holders precisely because they don't have an esteemed degree that allows hiring managers to give them the benefit of the doubt
• throwawayjava 8y ago
  "Tech" is too broad to say anything useful. A smart high schooler can learn "*nix and coding", and there's no way I would pay the $300K/yr that CS PhD holders cost if all I needed was a sys admin. But you're not going to build the first self-driving car without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to develop a new pharmaceutical without an army including lots of PhDs. You're not going to get the sort of branding that being the first to beat the best humans at Go/Chess/Poker can get you without an army including lots of PhDs. And so on. You're absolutely right that PhDs aren't required for the sort of sys admin and coding work that's accessible to bright high schoolers. But there are very few competent CS PhDs who would even bother applying for those jobs. Also, your comment isn't germane to the article because the article isn't talking about sys admin and coding jobs. I've literally never seen a job posting for a sys admin job that asks for a PhD. Have you?
• decebalus1 8y ago
  your post describes two biases: survivorship bias and confirmation bias. > Anyone can learn to code, be a great sysadmin, or a network guru. All it takes is want power. If you want it bad enough, you will get there. For a second there I thought I was reading some motivational speaker material. I'm not even going to try to explain how wrong that is.
• chrisseaton 8y ago
  > PhDs are great at research, not so much at actual doing things. Why do you think research doesn't count as actually doing something?
• esoterica 8y ago
  My hypothesis is that people like you who observe a negative correlation between competence and education only encounter such a phenomenon because you work for employers who are not attractive to candidates who have better options. If your company has no name recognition and crap pay, then anyone who is both competent and has the right credentials will be able to get a much better job elsewhere. So your only coworkers will be either people who are competent but don't have a degree, and who can't leave for better pay because they won't pass a resume screen, or people have a CS degree but can't get hired at a more desirable company because they are incompetent. Hence the perceived negative correlation, which is entirely down to selection bias.
• sytelus 8y ago
  You are talking about "old tech". The new tech is an entirely different beast. The new tech is about producing photos styled as if it was painted by Van Gogh. It's about rewriting sentence with correct grammar in word processor. It's about cooling billion dollar data center with highly complex architecture. It's about perfectly removing background from your photo even when it has your hair flying in the air. It's about perfectly translating voice to text and then searching vast knowledge graphs to answer questions. It's about beating world champions in games of highly complex strategy and tactics. You can't just throw bunch of great coders with high school diplomas at these problems and hope they would workout solutions. Solving any of above problems at the level we solve now would be considered pure magic and utterly surprising just a decade ago. These problems requires extensive mathematical modeling and leaning on research with incremental progress that has been collectively made by 100s of brilliant researchers over multiple decades. This is why PhD is desirable for "new tech".