2 ms·
In my experience there are two good reasons for hiring PhDs in some tech contexts. 1) you need specific, state of the art knowledge, and this person was active
by ska 8y ago
In my experience there are two good reasons for hiring PhDs in some tech contexts.
1) you need specific, state of the art knowledge, and this person was actively publishing in that precise area with significant impact.
2) you need good general problem solvers with some technical depth in an area.
If you hire #1, you should build a program around them to capture the knowledge. This is probably the most efficient way to absorb this as institutional knowledge. The ratio of these people to other engineering roles should be 1:fairly big number.
If you hire #2, you should already understand that you are not hiring general tech employees, and define roles accordingly. If they are new to industry they will probably have significant skill deficits (as well as significant skills) and you need a plan to deal with it. They probably are strongly motivated by spending quite a bit of their time on innovation. Plausible exceptions for people whose academic work was long ago.
If you're hiring because you think "smart programmer" you're probably doing it wrong, and will probably both regret it, in my experience.
There is a third model which is essentially building a internal academic environment, but that is expensive and long term enough not to apply to most situations.
- fogetti 8y ago> They probably are strongly motivated by spending quite a bit of their time on innovation I would rephrase it as spending time on research. Which might or might not be innovative. I know for a fact that there is a plethora of applied ML papers where people simply toy around with the sample set and publish their results. There is nothing innovative about it. Although it requires some knowledge in feature analysis and some other in related algorithms and in basic statistics but that's nothing that cannot be picked up by taking a few months of courses in applied machine learning. So really, in fact the only case where that extra knowledge is justified is your case #1. And even then I am not convinced that these PhDs actually have ever done anything innovative. There is just too much of a chance that they simply iterated on existing research ideas in their field and they can only continue to do so. Which is again not very innovative I think.