You can’t say that they have a leg up in general because It Depends. I’m an engineer and my job is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My dissertation involved

You can’t say that they have a leg up in general because It Depends. I’m an engineer and my job is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My dissertation involved developing highly parallelized solution algorithms for a specific type of problem. As such, I am quite well versed in low level Fortran/C code and MPI because I wrote code to do that, “that” being to solve an equation. I know this set of equations like it was second nature because of how much time I’ve invested in it. Not only that, but I would consider myself somewhat of an “expert” in the underlying mechanisms to solve these equations. Those being finite element methods. I can talk to you about tensor spaces and discretization and derivation of the numerical algorithms to solve these problems. I’d consider the code that I wrote/extended to be tech. My current job role is “just” an engineer working for a company where all I basically do is run and analyze models using commercial software. Even though I know the underlying low level code/algorithms of what I’m doing, I would be the first to tell you that a 21 year old mechanical engineering graduate could do my job as effectively and as completely as I could. Because none of the above paragraph actually matters in what I do. Maybe it gave me a leg up in the hiring process, but the knowledge I am applying for my job (which I enjoy) is what you’d learn in a 4 year degree with electives in eg numerical methods and fluid dynamics.