15 ms·

‘Hard’ skills from PhDs remain relevant beyond academia

178 points by nabla9 5y ago

temporalparts 5y ago
'Hard' skills from working as a McDonald's cashier remain relevant beyond restaurant business. 1. Understanding customer relationships 2. Creativity on the job: figuring out how to deal with edge cases for positive outcomes that were not in the corporate training manuals. 3. Understanding highly optimized and dynamic ordering systems, a workflow systems engineering marvel for delivering hot food fast. 4. Create financial wealth above and beyond most PhD students.
- tomrod 5y ago
  As someone who spent time in both worlds, true except (4). Personal knowledge capital investment has higher expected returns.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    Only if you eventually cash out.
  - yummypaint 5y ago
    Same here. There is something about practicing customer service in a human-facing job that conditions ones mind for immediate agressive problem solving.
    - rovr138 5y ago
      Specially if you add a timer and need to solve things quickly before you're the problem.
- dekhn 5y ago
  The one thing I learned as a mcdonald's cashier was how to compute change from a $20 in my head, quickly. There was nothing about the workflow system of my mcdonalds that delivered hot food fast. There was a ton of inefficiency in it. I made a number of recommendations to my manager who told me I needed to attend Hamburger University lectures of why what McDonalds did was so great.
  - temporalparts 5y ago
    If you got a PhD from Hamburger University, you'll have even more 'Hard' skills!
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
FpUser 5y ago
>"‘Hard’ skills from our PhDs remain relevant beyond academia" And the sky is blue.
omarhaneef 5y ago
This comes up a lot: everyone has some "skills" that transfer from one domain to another. Read an interview with a titan of industry and they will invariably bring up the willingness to get up early and work hard that s/he "learned" from the paper route. The CEO of the studio "learned" to network from being in the mailroom and so on. In theory, almost any job can give you some transferable skills. A PhD may give you many more than most. I know if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years, can communicate, analyze and so forth. I have enormous respect for PhDs, and believe they can deliver enormous value. But they are not the same kind of hire as an MBA. What is the difference between a PhD and an MBA? I think to me it captures the single most important attribute that you cannot pick up directly: what people care about. The thing about an MBA is, they really enjoy this "business stuff." They like thinking about markets, the customer, costs, finance, how to cross-sell, how to avoid dilution and the like. Its not just that the skills are different (though they are), it is that the interests are different. Source: comp sci PhD student who switched to an MBA.
- Moodles 5y ago
  Right. But are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? Not to offend, but MBAs just seem like networking and drinking degrees to me, for people that love business. I've seen MBAs syllabuses: I've literally seen very basic things like "profit = revenue - cost" on slides. It seems like with MBAs it's almost entirely soft skills, no?
  - mbot5324 5y ago
    Just as a layperson often underestimates the true depth of a PhD's expertise in their field of study, many people often underestimate the skill of someone who has spent a similarly long time meditating on the "soft skills" that actually glue a good idea into a successful business.
    - Moodles 5y ago
      I'm not arguing for hard skills over soft skills. I'm asking if MBAs actually provide transferrable hard skills.
Moodles 5y ago
Having obtained a PhD myself, I would say its definitely helped in my career, though that is largely because my industry work is related to my PhD; people tend to assume I'm an expert in this super complicated thing and they just need someone around who understands it as some kind of insurance or person to turn to in a crisis, even though with the PhD itself I was working in a niche within a niche within a niche which won't really help the company. Obviously during the PhD I got a working knowledge of the whole field, but I often feel as if a lot of what the company uses me for is pretty obvious and googleable. Very, very rarely do I actually use my PhD expertise. I definitely think if you work as a software engineer in tech a PhD would have too large an opportunity cost vs just working for it to be worth it, especially in the US where PhDs typically last ~5 years. Aside from that, I think I was lucky to have a supervisor who taught me how to make good presentations. I definitely think my presentations are a lot better than most peoples in industry and that's benefitted my career too. Though, I've also seen very many terrible presentations in academia so I'm probably just lucky there. I'm not sure its the case PhDs typically give better presentations. My LaTeX CV looks incredible though :) (though I highly doubt that will ever affect whether or not I get a particular job).
- frayesto 5y ago
  I will say that at multiple job interviews people have commented and been impressed with my LaTeX CV. So it's a plus!
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  I feel going from a CS PhD to working as a standard software engineer is probably a waste of the person’s time, while also resulting in lower pay. It’s not like other fields where your area of research might be very different from what you get employed for; in CS, your area of research probably has a startup that could use your domain skills. Eg: a CS Security PhD can find gainful employment on the security teams of any of the big software giants doing work that’s not too dissimilar from their research.
  - Moodles 5y ago
    Funny you should say that, because my PhD is in cryptography and the exact field I find myself in today is security.
timr 5y ago
This is easy to mock -- and others already are -- but there is some element of truth. I've always said that the PhD gave me two valuable things: 1) the demonstrated ability to complete a large, self-directed project from beginning to end, starting with ambiguous, poorly defined goals. 2) a herculean tolerance for bullshit. Both can be earned elsewhere, but the PhD was definitely a fast path. The first one is still quite rare, in my experience, and I'd call it a "hard skill".
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I don't know if anyone can call getting a PhD a "fast path" to these things. It's just a "virtually guaranteed" path. For example, at Goog most PhDs are hired at L5 "senior" positions. BSc (and many MSc) are typically hired at L3. Assuming they are the kind of person who could have done a PhD, they will get to L5 within 4-5 years, fewer for some, with a job ladder (read "promotion criteria") that reads almost exactly like point 1) and a committee of 10 tired, skeptical people they've never met before deciding whether they've demonstrated it for "sufficiently long" to warrant promotion. All the while, the BSc is making more than your advisor and gaining experience that is 100% relevant to their career. Not to say that PhD vs "a few years in industry" are equivalent in all respects, of course, but I would not at all say that the PhD is the fast path towards the skills you're calling out here.
- wott 5y ago
  > the demonstrated ability to complete a large, self-directed project from beginning to end I am not sure this (both the self-direction criterion and the 'complete to the end' criterion) applies to a majority of PhDs .
  - timr 5y ago
    Yeah, I hesitate a little there. There are a lot of PhD programs and doctoral students. Most of them are bad. But that's true of everything. If we focus on the positive outcome for a good student, those are the two things I think distinguishes someone from a doctorate from someone without.
  - lmeyerov 5y ago
searine 5y ago
Lots of snarky comments in this thread are missing the point: a lot of academics get tunnel vision. If you've spent 10 years studying ion transporters in mushrooms, it can feel like you are way over specialized and that getting a job outside of your narrow expertise in academia is impossible. It is not. A trained scientific mind is a valuable commodity in the job marketplace, regardless of your speciality.
q-big 5y ago
> Experience in grant-writing, data analysis and presentation will serve you well, say Samantha Baggott and Jonathan McGuire. These are in my opinion also soft skills from a PhD program (not 'hard' skills). The hard skills are the scientifically deep results that you learn and/or investigate as part of your research.
mlac 5y ago
Public speaking, writing, networking, reading primary sources, and independence are all useful. I’ve met really good PhDs, and awful ones. Awful ones wanted respect because they had the PhD. Really good ones realized how much they didn’t know and acknowledged that. A PhDs can be a requirement to get very highly specific jobs (ml at google or robotics at Argo AI) but it’s rubbed me the wrong way when PhDs are a bonus for stepping into leadership, which sometimes seems to occur in government / research labs tied to academia. I think PhDs often experience a dysfunctional work environment in their formative years during the PhD and then try to translate that to the work place, implementing almost a caste system with an over-emphasis on education and power concentrated at the top. Also I’ve seen some PhDs discount MBAs or other degrees that aren’t hard science because it’s not what they chose to study (physics or pure CS or Chemistry). I guess the point is that someone can get a PhD and be missing some basic core competencies.
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  The only people that have ever had problem with me (no degree) training them were PhDs. Most have had a superiority complex of their education over mine. I’m like “sorry they feel that way, but I built most of the software you’re gonna use”. Some PhDs have been super humble and they tend to be the smarter people I’ve met.
  - mlac 5y ago
    Yeah. I’m not sure how an additional 3-4 years in an academic environment early in a career makes a difference in one’s leadership ability 20-30 years down then road. And humble PhDs realize their limitations, which is required for continued learning.
runeblaze 5y ago
One "useful" skill PhDs seem to learn is how to manage a busy non 9-5 schedule while earning grad-school wages. This is a non-trivial and probably useful skill to have for many people, but if I were to earn an PhD and quit academia I sure hope that I would have a 9-5 job with high pay...
faangiq 5y ago
There are a lot of trash PhDs out there.
- analog31 5y ago
  Indeed, and this is an outgrowth of the fact that PhD education is relatively unstandardized. If you let people chart their own course, a few will figure out how to slide through without doing anything. Also, it's quite possible for someone to be capable of doing the research and producing the dissertation, but with such abysmal personal skills that they render themselves unemployable. On the other hand, HN is where I learned that employers think so highly of CS graduates that they find it necessary to give them an exam to find out if they actually learned to program. So I don't think it's unique to PhDs.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    A huge proportion of them do fail this exam, though, and the pass rate is not higher for PhDs. The problem is that most places are not hiring computer scientists. They are hiring programmers. You wouldn't hire a team of structural engineers to actually build your house. You'd hire a construction contractor. If you ask a bunch of structural engineers to install a window, you're not going to be very impressed with the results.
bmitc 5y ago
None of these arguments are contained to just PhDs and just further propagates that PhDs are somehow special.
geebee 5y ago
I think this article makes sense and makes a strong case for valuing a PhD if you have already completed one and don't plan to enter academia. You haven't wasted your time. But it doesn't make a strong case for choosing to pursue higher education beyond a proper, legit masters degree. I know MS degrees have been somewhat cheapened, as they are a quick and easy degree that qualifies for the much higher federal loan limits. A university can enroll lots of MS students, supervise them poorly, and profit. But there are still MS programs with a lot of integrity, where you can learn (provided you seek out the opportunity) to write a grant, publish, and do intense data analysis. In STEM, many masters programs also tend to offer RA and/or TAships, which means you can graduate with minimal debt, and you'll have the opportunity to present at mini-conferences or seminars. You won't be as good at this as you would if you pursued a PhD, but if you get a job and keep working on it, you will be better off in 4-5 years. That said - if you want to go the academic route, a PhD is so close to essential that I'm happy to give a half hand wave and call it essential.
quanto 5y ago
Premise: A person spends 5 - 6 years doing a focused task; and the resulting skills are transferable to other fields. This premise is not surprising. As others pointed out, you can be doing anything and learn something that is valuable and transferable. The real question is whether a PhD program is the most time- and energy-efficient way of learning those transferable skills. If you were doing your own startup for 5 - 6 years, would you have learned less transferable skills? How about 3-year tenures at 2 of FAANG? What is the opportunity cost of a PhD?
- ModernMech 5y ago
  It’s really best to think about a PhD as an apprenticeship to run a research lab. If you go into it with that expectation, you’re not bound to be disappointed. Any other perceptions may leave you a bit disillusioned. The true value of a PhD is that you get to spend about 8 years or so learning under the close tutelage of a distinguished individual in some field. And really, that’s how you should pick your program — more than the school or the program or the research topic, you have to pick a researcher you want to work with; your brain is going to end up working a lot like theirs by the time you defend your dissertation. Because what they are going to do is teach you everything they know. It’s incredible, you will feel like a novice at the beginning, but there comes a point a few years in when you realize that actually, you know about as much about this topic now as someone considered an expert in the field. In fact, you are writing their papers that they are publishing. And actually, you disagree with some aspects here and there. Then suddenly, you start having ideas of your own, ideas that you know no one else has thought of before. So you write them down, and that is how a researcher is born. At this point the idea is that you are kicked from the nest and you will set up a research startup at some other university. This is much like running any other startup but the product is research papers and the revenue is federal grant money. So to the questions at hand: 1. Are there skills you learn during a PhD that you can learn elsewhere? Of course. And maybe sooner. A great deal of time is spent on the dissertation. You may have acquired the necessary skills only a few years in. Many people in CS acquire these skills outside of a PhD program (and wrongly assume they have therefore obviated the degree entirely). 2. What are the opportunity costs of getting a PhD? Well, quite a lot of money although not as much as you think (due to stipends and tuition remission). But there is a lot of financial upside afterwards depending on the field. But I think if you look at peer groups in their early 30s, PhDs would be on average much poorer but some ramping up to much higher earnings. 3. What are the opportunity costs of not doing a PhD? You will be locked out of some opportunities for good. Or at least, a PhD is an easy way of unlocking some opportunities. For example being an expert witness. It’s easier to immigrate to some countries if you have a PhD. It’s easier to get visas. There are certain grants you can only qualify for if you have a PhD. Also people treat you like you know everything about everything. This is a blessing and a curse, because if you’re like me you are wrong a lot. Then people will make remarks like “you have a PhD? How do you not know this?” The flip side is your relatives will love to brag about it and it will make your aunts very proud to tell their peers. And finally, there is really no other way to get that apprenticeship experience. If you really want to get into a topic, spend the better part of a decade obsessed with it, with no other responsibilities or distractions, then I know of no other place to do that than a PhD. Some startups could be close but really would need a lot of funding and be okay with little to show for 7 years. I don’t know many investors that would be cool with that but maybe there are.
wallscratch 5y ago
As a current PhD student in computational neuroscience, I think most of the academics I interact with tend to drastically overestimate the value of their “data science” skills to real jobs, and underestimate the value of software skills beyond prototyping.
- mlac 5y ago
  Industry is still moving from excel / spreadsheet modeling to tableau and python and alteryx in the workplace. Knowing python today is knowing excel 20 years ago. Most companies aren’t ready to do real data science, and the transition is as much an organizational problem as it is a technical one.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  I spent my Ph.D. coding in MATLAB, as my Ph.D. was experimental and MATLAB was mainly used for data analysis and plotting. On the other hand, I had a full conda package with complete documentation up and running by the end of my postdoc. Though this was a side project, the time spent on this was incredibly valuable. I did not have to prove to anyone I was proficient in Python; my GitHub was enough. Additionally, the vast majority of researchers' extent of Python expertise was limited to disjointed Jupyter notebooks - while I had a running package with extensive documentation. I got 3 job offers just based on my package itself - while very few non-academic jobs were interested in my publications. The fact that I had a few first-authors in reputed journals was enough; nobody was interested in their contents.
  - analog31 5y ago
    At my workplace we assume if you're a good Matlab programmer, you can teach yourself Python in a jiffy. What's a bit tricky is that every resume mentions Matlab and Python. Having a public repo is a useful way to show what you can do.
    - N1H1L 5y ago
      This is the key. Everyone claims Python/MATLAB proficiency, yet there is honestly a vast competency spectrum. A polished public repo, in my experience, will really help you stand out.
inputvolch 5y ago
Those were the only `hard` skills they could come up with? This reads like someone who is trying really hard to validate their life decision to spend many, many years in higher education. I mean: > we still say (and write) things such as ‘heuristics’, ‘confirmation bias’ or ‘family-wise error rate’ If you came out of a PhD and think these are challenging concepts to pick up, or that they somehow make you more valuable than your average technical employee, well, I don't know what to tell you. I generally avoid hiring PhDs onto my teams unless the problem I'm faced with is PRECISELY what they researched. 9 times out of 10 a highly motivated generalist is far more valuable than a PhD.
- barefeg 5y ago
  Do you have examples of how hiring PhDs can go wrong? I have a similar feeling that generalists are usually better unless the problem is exactly what they studied. But I don’t have number nor stories to back this claim
  - rovr138 5y ago
    I'll only comment on this, > Do you have examples of how hiring PhDs can go wrong? Not so much wrong, but there's a curve IMO. This is biased and based on my limited experience. Writing code or working on production systems sometimes they have trouble working the code bases. They can code, but don't necessarily have developed yet the skills to dig into code. I think everyone has this issue starting. There's also a big difference in code from academia to industry. Same with problems. We need a solution and a usable one. It doesn't have to be THE theoretical best thing always. It has to work. For example, you can't just not consider constants in complexities in production. Those constants take time. An example can be Netflix's challenge, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120409/03412518422/why-netflix-never-implemented-algorithm-that-won-netflix-1-million-challenge.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120409/03412518422/why-n... ---- I don't necessarily agree with the generalists part. I think we all specialize over time and have some of the same issues changing language or even frameworks. We just don't have or know the best way of doing things within it yet.
barefeg 5y ago
Most of these skills are not so useful as an individual contributor, but rather for someone in leadership/c-level. But taking those roles as a fresh graduate is very hard. Most established companies would much rather hire someone with actual experience in those roles
ThomPete 5y ago
Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD. This is no different than anyone who spends all their time producing a great album, or building a company or programming a game and I could go on. The PhD if you want to talk about it in generalized terms has no unique properties that can't be accomplished through other means.
- rbartelme 5y ago
  > Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD. I often equate my Ph.D. with the ability to teach myself how to do things. Ex. going from a wet/dry lab biologist with zero experience in C-style languages, to learning Arduino's flavor of Cpp and the PID control library to run process controls for your wet lab biology experiment.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    That makes it sound like a pretty terrible value, honestly. That kind of "fake it till you make it" plunging into new domains is something people often learn without spending 6 years fighting academia. In fact, your exact example is the kind of project you'd buy for e.g. a teen that likes computers. I still the think the main value of a PhD is learning to wade through adversarial bullshit and bureaucracy and actually deliver something unless your career overlaps heavily with your research.
gwerbret 5y ago
Perhaps I'm definitionally-challenged, but none of the skills listed strike me as "hard" skills. I see a hard skill as being one for which a person receives domain-specific training, e.g. CS major at $SCHOOL learning to program in Rust. In contrast, the soft skills are those obtained in the process of achieving the hard skills, e.g. aforementioned CS major developing teamwork and time management skills while working on a group project. In this vein, none of the skills listed in this article (grant-writing, data analysis, information synthesis, data presentation) are domain-specific.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  It is a rather soft definition of hard, yes.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    It borders on saying, "it takes general intelligence to do this, and it takes general intelligence to have a job, therefore people who can do this often can do a job."
- humanistbot 5y ago
  The hard/soft distinction is a bad metaphor that we should stop using, especially when talking about science. Both soft and hard have other meanings that come with so many implicit cultural assumptions. Domain-specific vs domain-independent is far more precise. And if you want to refer to social/communication skills, why not just say that?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Hard means it is easy to measure as they have rigid shape and form. Soft means it is hard to measure as soft items doesn't have shape or other properties similar to hard items. So a hard skill could be "this person knows how to code basic programs that works". A soft skill could be "this person knows how to write code that others find easy to understand and modify". The first is much easier to test and measure, the second is really hard to test but is still valuable. Note that hard/soft has nothing to do with how difficult they are to acquire. Thus the hardest of skills are when the job requires licensing or similar. If you want to hire a doctor then you need someone who is licensed for it. This requirement is 100% rigid and it is very easy to test if they have a licence, the candidate absolutely needs it so there is no compromise to be done.
analog31 5y ago
I have a physics PhD from 30 years ago. I think it's just too hard to generalize. PhDs are still relatively few and far between, come from different disciplines, have different interests, strengths, weaknesses. We're not exactly children when we start a PhD program, so our trajectory is influenced by what we've already done. We come from 100 countries. An odd thing about physics is that we don't have a lot of our own tools or techniques. We're opportunists and we borrow ideas from everywhere. My thesis involved nascent laser technology, mechanics, electronics, theory, programming, data analysis, and a bit of chemistry. Historically, physicists were often the pioneering users of those things before they became branches of engineering. Today, my work still tends to be multidisciplinary. I do a lot of programming, but I've never wanted a software development job per se. I'm willing to work on problems that are ill-defined, that don't fall into anybody's field, and that might not be solvable. Almost all of my work is heavily quantitative. I interact regularly with management, customers, academics, etc. The people at my workplace who are doing that kind of stuff are, by and large, PhDs. They are not necessarily the highest paid employees -- the coders probably have us beat. What I don't know (if I were to anticipate reasonable skepticism) is whether this is a special feature of PhDs, or if we move into this role by necessity due to the lack of marketable hard skills. I don't know if any of my skills, taken in isolation, would be enough to get me a job.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  Physics PhD from about 7 years ago. My impressions are the same as yours.
- peter303 5y ago
  One percent in US have PhD.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  >An odd thing about physics is that we don't have a lot of our own tools or techniques. We're opportunists and we borrow ideas from everywhere. Spot on! Do you mind sharing what kind of role/company you are with, and how you got there from where you started?
lordnacho 5y ago
Honestly it sounds a bit desperate. I'm not dissing the idea of getting a PhD, I think it's a big achievement. But this sort of argument is the kind of thing I heard when I finishing my undergrad, and it wasn't convincing then either. Grant Applications: Very specific academic "skill" which is intimately tied to the bureaucracy of the university system of your particular country or region. It also has a lot to do with things that aren't even in the application: who you know and what they think of you. Whatever org you join later will have some other way for funding to come down, and there are so many varieties of org that you'll just have to learn on that job. Analyzing Data: That's definitely useful, but there's general and specific. There are lots of people who can't do it, and by doing a PhD you definitely show people that you are capable. But, and it's a huge but, you will be spending a heck of a lot of time poring over the evidence on some very specific area of science, with its own conventions and paradigms. When you go and do something else, that won't be relevant. People will of course see that you are generally intelligent, and that's great, but you'll have to learn whole new fields at your next gig. Your issue then is that it's possible to show general intelligence and ability to learn deep material without doing the whole PhD. In fact plenty of people will look at a Bachelor's and conclude the person is smart enough to learn how derivatives work, or how the advertising business works, and so on. Presentations: There's simply no less efficient way to learn presentation skills than to do a hard science PhD. It doesn't make any sense, a PhD takes a lot of work and how much of it is actually doing presentation specifically? Yes, I know they do presentations as part of it. But the kind of presentation skill you want is what your typical smooth talker is good at: confidently being able to talk about something that everyone can relate to. Think Obama or one of those Apple-guy-on-stage things. Are you going to learn that on your PhD? From what I hear, science fields are very very specific and although you are presenting, there's a fair bit of focus on the substance, plus you are presenting to people who are also insiders. If you want to just be less nervous and uhm-and-aw less, there are better ways to practice. There are of course good reasons to get a PhD, such as a desire to learn that specific field. But the cost/benefit of doing it in order to learn generally applicable skills seems off to me.
- rbartelme 5y ago
  "Grant Applications: Very specific academic "skill" which is intimately tied to the bureaucracy of the university system of your particular country or region. It also has a lot to do with things that aren't even in the application: who you know and what ? they think of you. Whatever org you join later will have some other way for funding to come down, and there are so many varieties of org that you'll just have to learn on that job." I think the country/region part you mention is most relevant here, but I disagree with the overall assessment of grant writing being irrelevant. If you work in a start-up or the R&D division of a company, there's still grant money to be had. This lets companies pursue high risk projects while not jeopardizing overall revenue.
artemisyna 5y ago
The thing articles like this miss is the problem is not will there be some set of skills gained on a given path, but what skills are gained (and at what opportunity cost) versus alternatives.
edw519 5y ago
‘Hard’ skills from our PhDs remain relevant beyond academia Experience in grant-writing, data analysis and presentation will serve you well, say Samantha Baggott and Jonathan McGuire. You can say that about anything. My version (which I firmly believe): ‘Hard’ skills from McDonald's remain relevant beyond foodservice Experience in showing up on time, being trained and prepared, caring about customers, and getting done what must be done will serve you well, says edw519 Edit: Oops, I just noticed a similar (and much more insightful) McDonald's reference in this thread from temporalparts. :-)
antishatter 5y ago
1) seems like a fuckin “duh” 2) obvious conflict of interest, PhD’s writing about how useful PhD’s are?
crispyambulance 5y ago
I think folks are getting hung up on what is or is not a "hard skill". It doesn't matter. Lots of people leave academia with/without a PHD and go to work in places where their degree and the skills/knowledge gained by that pursuit aren't specifically required. How relevant your degree actually is (how much it "helps" you) depends on where you end up and how much you're willing to adapt. Whatever the case, with some things you're going to be just as novice as a 22 year old entry level candidate (in my case, probably even worse). I recall leaving my phd program and months later in "a job" encountering my first "project manager". I literally didn't know that this job title even existed. I blurted out to some co-workers "Who is this person and why did they ask everyone to estimate on the spot when they would be done with their piece of the project, and anyway, how could we even estimate something so uncertain?" Everyone just laughed! ...and so began my years long reality-check where I discovered exactly how green the grass was on the "other side" working in corporate jobs.
rcpt 5y ago
Most important skill from my PhD is the realization that always being wrong and nothing working for months at a time is actually par for the course instead of something to stress over.
- jll29 5y ago
  When I hire a Ph.D., I hire someone that has undergone something that I know from own experience requires a lot of curiosity, perseverance, drive, self-motivation, self-management, and an ability to communicate well in writing and orally, to convince adversarial audiences, systematic thinking, analytical problem solving skills - each one of them priceless skills.
honkycat 5y ago
I have a buddy who is a lab tech at a university. He is under-paid and under appreciated. He has a masters in physics. Really smart guy! I keep telling him: The math background he has would be a huge asset in CS. He should change careers! He is very skeptical. He feels like he is too old to start( 35 ). At the end of the day, if he doesn't want to change that is his business, and I don't want to badger him. I just feel like he would be great as a ML/Data engineer.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  He'd be fine at anything non-specialized in tech. Regular application programming is so much easier than physics that it's laughable.
black_13 5y ago
karaterobot 5y ago
Coming out of academia, I would say the biggest thing I had to internalize was that nobody in the for-profit world cares about your interesting findings, unless those interesting findings result in more money. So, apart from just being able to write to a format, I don't think grant proposal skills are transferable, and in some sense they may hurt you if you forget that the case you're making is not about research, it's about generating profits. FWIW, I don't think this a bad thing in many cases. I left academia after I realized that our 4-year NSF project to build collaborative software was never intended to actually improve anyone's life, or even to ever be used outside of our very limited study. It didn't have to be good, or useful, or get adopted by any community in order to succeed. The motivations were completely different: it was to write more papers, and get the next grant, and fund the next set of grad students, so they could build something else that would never be used. Grant proposals all the way down. Yes, basic research is valuable, obviously, my point is just that it's an entirely different, and largely non-transferable worldview from the private sector.
- counters 5y ago
  IMHO an important point here is that in much of the story as you've described it, there are incredibly valuable skills that just need to be re-dressed. As an academician who was lured to industry by an interesting startup and has worked the gamut of positions from IC to executive, I'm reasonably confident in telling folks that it's all about perspective. If things look upside down, then turn yourself to match! For example: > I don't think grant proposal skills are transferable, Well, they actually probably are. If you work as a domain expert on the business or technical side of an organization, you may need to directly engage with funding agencies, other companies, or some other agent where your ability to (a) understand the audience and what is required to persuade them to support your idea, and (b) quickly execute on the content required to generate the proposal. Extra points if you were one of those pre-tenure faculty who needed to submit a half-dozen grant proposals every quarter, because you've likely built some intuition as to where it's safe to cut corners in your writing and pitching. Sure, in most jobs you may not be writing NSF proposals every week, but the general skill of effective and succinct technical communication is beyond valuable across a wide swath of applications you'll find in industry. > The motivations were completely different: it was to write more papers, and get the next grant ... but that's, in a sense, the same thing as the start-up hustle, is it not? Build the MVP, get that one extra client - not because this next iteration of your product is going to change the world, but it's one more notch on your belt that will look good in the next funding round. Hell, maybe the majority of what you're building on any given iteration is throw-away work, but it's towards an explicit goal. I don't really see the start-up rat race as much different than the grant rat race (for better or for worse - I'm not making a judgment call here).
spamizbad 5y ago
My wife has a PhD and I've always been impressed with her skillset. Although she's not quite ready to join "the industry", there's truly a massive gulf between the quality of research, writing, organization and analysis she can produce compared to what I've encountered in the workforce.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Keep in mind that you probably wouldn't have married her if you thought she was a dolt, so there's quite a bit of selection bias at work here. There are a lot of people with PhDs that are not so impressive, both in industry and in academia.
graycat 5y ago
(1) Financial Math. Some of the comments here have to do with mathematical finance, e.g., the Black-Scholes model. Mathematical finance done with theorems and proofs has some strong prerequisites of measure theory with sigma algebras, Markov processes, Brownian motion, the Radon-Nikodym theorem, conditional expectation, stochastic integration, e.g., Ioannis Karatzas, Steven E. Shreve, Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus, Robert M. Blumenthal and Ronald K. Getoor, Markov Processes and Potential Theory. Can also want parabolic partial differential equations and stochastic dynamic programming. In my experience, with a pure/applied math Ph.D. and as a prof in an MBA program, nearly no MBA students or profs have those prerequisites. And with my experience in finance, nearly no one in finance has those prerequisites, either. The people in MBA programs, as students or professors, may have gotten such a background from Cinlar, Shreve, or one of a few more. Bluntly, not many people, a tiny fraction even in pure math, and a good background in pure math is a prerequisite, actually study stochastic processes and stochastic optimal control with a measure theory prerequisite. Anyone X with anything like that math background might want to be careful or that background will scare nearly all potential employers, in finance or anything else, and result in X being ostracized and fired or not hired. (2) Math in MBA Programs. When I was a prof in an MBA program, all the math used was undergraduate level, e.g., with hardly even a calculus prerequisite. (3) Advanced STEM Educations for Non-Academic Jobs. It appears that an advanced education, e.g., in computer science, can help in getting a non-academic job, but the real help is just passing a filter, having proved oneself, and not aiding in doing the job. This situation should not be a surprise: Having exceptionally good qualifications will make a person X exceptional and rare, that is, one out of 100+. Then the other 99 can be afraid and resentful and gang up on X, sabotage X with gossip, keep X out of the loop, etc. (4) Jobs and People with Exceptional Qualifications. It is common for someone X with exceptional qualifications to attempt to use those qualifications to get and do well in a job as an employee. That would mean that person X has a supervisor Y who created the job. But as we can anticipate, it is rare for a supervisor Y to have the exceptional qualifications or to create a job that needs such qualifications. Moreover Y could be uncomfortable, feel threatened by, a subordinate X having and using qualifications Y did not have. In simple terms, commonly Y hires X to apply routine muscle to work conceived by Y. To borrow from a James Bond movie, X is not hired to think and, instead, is hired to do what they are told. (5) Potential of Exceptional Qualifications. For a person with exceptional qualifications that might be powerful and valuable for a career, don't look for a corresponding job created by someone else and, instead, create the corresponding job for yourself. E.g., do a startup. (6) Financial Success. If person X works as an employee, then the supervisor of X knows to the last penny just how much money X is making and usually will do their best to keep down the amount. However, if person X owns a business, then for X the customers replace the supervisor, and it's common for the customers not to know even roughly how much money X is making. So, net, for X with exceptional qualifications that seem powerful and valuable, start and run a successful business and make use of those qualifications. There X can be making a nice fortune, with no supervisor at all and with customers who neither know nor much care how much X is making. (7) Academic Research Jobs. In academic research, the prof is essentially begging a little money from sources with big money, working hard, and then begging journals to let them give away the results of the work for free. So, we might anticipate that such jobs won't pay very well. I concluded that broadly academic jobs were, for someone who wanted to support a family with financial security, financially irresponsible.
peter303 5y ago
Having both a STEM PhD and been software engineering for decades, I'd say article covers the operational aspect of the PhD, i.e. project management skills. The other half of the PhD is knowing what is a significant chuck of doable research. Newbie PhD students often err in selecting topics too small, too large to do in 3 years, or already have been done. This would then correspond in software engineering to a program managers role in selecting features for the next successful release.

178 points by nabla9 5y ago

'Hard' skills from working as a McDonald's cashier remain relevant beyond restaurant business. 1. Understanding customer relationships 2. Creativity on the job: figuring out how to deal with edge cases for positive outcomes that were not in the corporate training manuals. 3. Understanding highly optimized and dynamic ordering systems, a workflow systems engineering marvel for delivering hot food fast. 4. Create financial wealth above and beyond most PhD students.

tomrod 5y ago
As someone who spent time in both worlds, true except (4). Personal knowledge capital investment has higher expected returns.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Only if you eventually cash out.
- yummypaint 5y ago
  Same here. There is something about practicing customer service in a human-facing job that conditions ones mind for immediate agressive problem solving.
  - rovr138 5y ago
    Specially if you add a timer and need to solve things quickly before you're the problem.
dekhn 5y ago
The one thing I learned as a mcdonald's cashier was how to compute change from a $20 in my head, quickly. There was nothing about the workflow system of my mcdonalds that delivered hot food fast. There was a ton of inefficiency in it. I made a number of recommendations to my manager who told me I needed to attend Hamburger University lectures of why what McDonalds did was so great.
- temporalparts 5y ago
  If you got a PhD from Hamburger University, you'll have even more 'Hard' skills!
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

FpUser 5y ago

>"‘Hard’ skills from our PhDs remain relevant beyond academia" And the sky is blue.

omarhaneef 5y ago

This comes up a lot: everyone has some "skills" that transfer from one domain to another. Read an interview with a titan of industry and they will invariably bring up the willingness to get up early and work hard that s/he "learned" from the paper route. The CEO of the studio "learned" to network from being in the mailroom and so on. In theory, almost any job can give you some transferable skills. A PhD may give you many more than most. I know if you have PhD you (probably) worked really, really, really hard, were able to focus on a single problem for years, can communicate, analyze and so forth. I have enormous respect for PhDs, and believe they can deliver enormous value. But they are not the same kind of hire as an MBA. What is the difference between a PhD and an MBA? I think to me it captures the single most important attribute that you cannot pick up directly: what people care about. The thing about an MBA is, they really enjoy this "business stuff." They like thinking about markets, the customer, costs, finance, how to cross-sell, how to avoid dilution and the like. Its not just that the skills are different (though they are), it is that the interests are different. Source: comp sci PhD student who switched to an MBA.

Moodles 5y ago
Right. But are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? Not to offend, but MBAs just seem like networking and drinking degrees to me, for people that love business. I've seen MBAs syllabuses: I've literally seen very basic things like "profit = revenue - cost" on slides. It seems like with MBAs it's almost entirely soft skills, no?
- mbot5324 5y ago
  Just as a layperson often underestimates the true depth of a PhD's expertise in their field of study, many people often underestimate the skill of someone who has spent a similarly long time meditating on the "soft skills" that actually glue a good idea into a successful business.
  - Moodles 5y ago
    I'm not arguing for hard skills over soft skills. I'm asking if MBAs actually provide transferrable hard skills.

Moodles 5y ago

Having obtained a PhD myself, I would say its definitely helped in my career, though that is largely because my industry work is related to my PhD; people tend to assume I'm an expert in this super complicated thing and they just need someone around who understands it as some kind of insurance or person to turn to in a crisis, even though with the PhD itself I was working in a niche within a niche within a niche which won't really help the company. Obviously during the PhD I got a working knowledge of the whole field, but I often feel as if a lot of what the company uses me for is pretty obvious and googleable. Very, very rarely do I actually use my PhD expertise. I definitely think if you work as a software engineer in tech a PhD would have too large an opportunity cost vs just working for it to be worth it, especially in the US where PhDs typically last ~5 years. Aside from that, I think I was lucky to have a supervisor who taught me how to make good presentations. I definitely think my presentations are a lot better than most peoples in industry and that's benefitted my career too. Though, I've also seen very many terrible presentations in academia so I'm probably just lucky there. I'm not sure its the case PhDs typically give better presentations. My LaTeX CV looks incredible though :) (though I highly doubt that will ever affect whether or not I get a particular job).

frayesto 5y ago
I will say that at multiple job interviews people have commented and been impressed with my LaTeX CV. So it's a plus!
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
I feel going from a CS PhD to working as a standard software engineer is probably a waste of the person’s time, while also resulting in lower pay. It’s not like other fields where your area of research might be very different from what you get employed for; in CS, your area of research probably has a startup that could use your domain skills. Eg: a CS Security PhD can find gainful employment on the security teams of any of the big software giants doing work that’s not too dissimilar from their research.
- Moodles 5y ago
  Funny you should say that, because my PhD is in cryptography and the exact field I find myself in today is security.

timr 5y ago

This is easy to mock -- and others already are -- but there is some element of truth. I've always said that the PhD gave me two valuable things: 1) the demonstrated ability to complete a large, self-directed project from beginning to end, starting with ambiguous, poorly defined goals. 2) a herculean tolerance for bullshit. Both can be earned elsewhere, but the PhD was definitely a fast path. The first one is still quite rare, in my experience, and I'd call it a "hard skill".

hiptobecubic 5y ago
I don't know if anyone can call getting a PhD a "fast path" to these things. It's just a "virtually guaranteed" path. For example, at Goog most PhDs are hired at L5 "senior" positions. BSc (and many MSc) are typically hired at L3. Assuming they are the kind of person who could have done a PhD, they will get to L5 within 4-5 years, fewer for some, with a job ladder (read "promotion criteria") that reads almost exactly like point 1) and a committee of 10 tired, skeptical people they've never met before deciding whether they've demonstrated it for "sufficiently long" to warrant promotion. All the while, the BSc is making more than your advisor and gaining experience that is 100% relevant to their career. Not to say that PhD vs "a few years in industry" are equivalent in all respects, of course, but I would not at all say that the PhD is the fast path towards the skills you're calling out here.
wott 5y ago
> the demonstrated ability to complete a large, self-directed project from beginning to end I am not sure this (both the self-direction criterion and the 'complete to the end' criterion) applies to a majority of PhDs .
- timr 5y ago
  Yeah, I hesitate a little there. There are a lot of PhD programs and doctoral students. Most of them are bad. But that's true of everything. If we focus on the positive outcome for a good student, those are the two things I think distinguishes someone from a doctorate from someone without.
- lmeyerov 5y ago

searine 5y ago

Lots of snarky comments in this thread are missing the point: a lot of academics get tunnel vision. If you've spent 10 years studying ion transporters in mushrooms, it can feel like you are way over specialized and that getting a job outside of your narrow expertise in academia is impossible. It is not. A trained scientific mind is a valuable commodity in the job marketplace, regardless of your speciality.

q-big 5y ago

> Experience in grant-writing, data analysis and presentation will serve you well, say Samantha Baggott and Jonathan McGuire. These are in my opinion also soft skills from a PhD program (not 'hard' skills). The hard skills are the scientifically deep results that you learn and/or investigate as part of your research.

mlac 5y ago

Public speaking, writing, networking, reading primary sources, and independence are all useful. I’ve met really good PhDs, and awful ones. Awful ones wanted respect because they had the PhD. Really good ones realized how much they didn’t know and acknowledged that. A PhDs can be a requirement to get very highly specific jobs (ml at google or robotics at Argo AI) but it’s rubbed me the wrong way when PhDs are a bonus for stepping into leadership, which sometimes seems to occur in government / research labs tied to academia. I think PhDs often experience a dysfunctional work environment in their formative years during the PhD and then try to translate that to the work place, implementing almost a caste system with an over-emphasis on education and power concentrated at the top. Also I’ve seen some PhDs discount MBAs or other degrees that aren’t hard science because it’s not what they chose to study (physics or pure CS or Chemistry). I guess the point is that someone can get a PhD and be missing some basic core competencies.

jbluepolarbear 5y ago
The only people that have ever had problem with me (no degree) training them were PhDs. Most have had a superiority complex of their education over mine. I’m like “sorry they feel that way, but I built most of the software you’re gonna use”. Some PhDs have been super humble and they tend to be the smarter people I’ve met.
- mlac 5y ago
  Yeah. I’m not sure how an additional 3-4 years in an academic environment early in a career makes a difference in one’s leadership ability 20-30 years down then road. And humble PhDs realize their limitations, which is required for continued learning.

runeblaze 5y ago

One "useful" skill PhDs seem to learn is how to manage a busy non 9-5 schedule while earning grad-school wages. This is a non-trivial and probably useful skill to have for many people, but if I were to earn an PhD and quit academia I sure hope that I would have a 9-5 job with high pay...

faangiq 5y ago

There are a lot of trash PhDs out there.

analog31 5y ago
Indeed, and this is an outgrowth of the fact that PhD education is relatively unstandardized. If you let people chart their own course, a few will figure out how to slide through without doing anything. Also, it's quite possible for someone to be capable of doing the research and producing the dissertation, but with such abysmal personal skills that they render themselves unemployable. On the other hand, HN is where I learned that employers think so highly of CS graduates that they find it necessary to give them an exam to find out if they actually learned to program. So I don't think it's unique to PhDs.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  A huge proportion of them do fail this exam, though, and the pass rate is not higher for PhDs. The problem is that most places are not hiring computer scientists. They are hiring programmers. You wouldn't hire a team of structural engineers to actually build your house. You'd hire a construction contractor. If you ask a bunch of structural engineers to install a window, you're not going to be very impressed with the results.

bmitc 5y ago

None of these arguments are contained to just PhDs and just further propagates that PhDs are somehow special.

geebee 5y ago

I think this article makes sense and makes a strong case for valuing a PhD if you have already completed one and don't plan to enter academia. You haven't wasted your time. But it doesn't make a strong case for choosing to pursue higher education beyond a proper, legit masters degree. I know MS degrees have been somewhat cheapened, as they are a quick and easy degree that qualifies for the much higher federal loan limits. A university can enroll lots of MS students, supervise them poorly, and profit. But there are still MS programs with a lot of integrity, where you can learn (provided you seek out the opportunity) to write a grant, publish, and do intense data analysis. In STEM, many masters programs also tend to offer RA and/or TAships, which means you can graduate with minimal debt, and you'll have the opportunity to present at mini-conferences or seminars. You won't be as good at this as you would if you pursued a PhD, but if you get a job and keep working on it, you will be better off in 4-5 years. That said - if you want to go the academic route, a PhD is so close to essential that I'm happy to give a half hand wave and call it essential.

quanto 5y ago

Premise: A person spends 5 - 6 years doing a focused task; and the resulting skills are transferable to other fields. This premise is not surprising. As others pointed out, you can be doing anything and learn something that is valuable and transferable. The real question is whether a PhD program is the most time- and energy-efficient way of learning those transferable skills. If you were doing your own startup for 5 - 6 years, would you have learned less transferable skills? How about 3-year tenures at 2 of FAANG? What is the opportunity cost of a PhD?

ModernMech 5y ago
It’s really best to think about a PhD as an apprenticeship to run a research lab. If you go into it with that expectation, you’re not bound to be disappointed. Any other perceptions may leave you a bit disillusioned. The true value of a PhD is that you get to spend about 8 years or so learning under the close tutelage of a distinguished individual in some field. And really, that’s how you should pick your program — more than the school or the program or the research topic, you have to pick a researcher you want to work with; your brain is going to end up working a lot like theirs by the time you defend your dissertation. Because what they are going to do is teach you everything they know. It’s incredible, you will feel like a novice at the beginning, but there comes a point a few years in when you realize that actually, you know about as much about this topic now as someone considered an expert in the field. In fact, you are writing their papers that they are publishing. And actually, you disagree with some aspects here and there. Then suddenly, you start having ideas of your own, ideas that you know no one else has thought of before. So you write them down, and that is how a researcher is born. At this point the idea is that you are kicked from the nest and you will set up a research startup at some other university. This is much like running any other startup but the product is research papers and the revenue is federal grant money. So to the questions at hand: 1. Are there skills you learn during a PhD that you can learn elsewhere? Of course. And maybe sooner. A great deal of time is spent on the dissertation. You may have acquired the necessary skills only a few years in. Many people in CS acquire these skills outside of a PhD program (and wrongly assume they have therefore obviated the degree entirely). 2. What are the opportunity costs of getting a PhD? Well, quite a lot of money although not as much as you think (due to stipends and tuition remission). But there is a lot of financial upside afterwards depending on the field. But I think if you look at peer groups in their early 30s, PhDs would be on average much poorer but some ramping up to much higher earnings. 3. What are the opportunity costs of not doing a PhD? You will be locked out of some opportunities for good. Or at least, a PhD is an easy way of unlocking some opportunities. For example being an expert witness. It’s easier to immigrate to some countries if you have a PhD. It’s easier to get visas. There are certain grants you can only qualify for if you have a PhD. Also people treat you like you know everything about everything. This is a blessing and a curse, because if you’re like me you are wrong a lot. Then people will make remarks like “you have a PhD? How do you not know this?” The flip side is your relatives will love to brag about it and it will make your aunts very proud to tell their peers. And finally, there is really no other way to get that apprenticeship experience. If you really want to get into a topic, spend the better part of a decade obsessed with it, with no other responsibilities or distractions, then I know of no other place to do that than a PhD. Some startups could be close but really would need a lot of funding and be okay with little to show for 7 years. I don’t know many investors that would be cool with that but maybe there are.

wallscratch 5y ago

As a current PhD student in computational neuroscience, I think most of the academics I interact with tend to drastically overestimate the value of their “data science” skills to real jobs, and underestimate the value of software skills beyond prototyping.

mlac 5y ago
Industry is still moving from excel / spreadsheet modeling to tableau and python and alteryx in the workplace. Knowing python today is knowing excel 20 years ago. Most companies aren’t ready to do real data science, and the transition is as much an organizational problem as it is a technical one.
N1H1L 5y ago
I spent my Ph.D. coding in MATLAB, as my Ph.D. was experimental and MATLAB was mainly used for data analysis and plotting. On the other hand, I had a full conda package with complete documentation up and running by the end of my postdoc. Though this was a side project, the time spent on this was incredibly valuable. I did not have to prove to anyone I was proficient in Python; my GitHub was enough. Additionally, the vast majority of researchers' extent of Python expertise was limited to disjointed Jupyter notebooks - while I had a running package with extensive documentation. I got 3 job offers just based on my package itself - while very few non-academic jobs were interested in my publications. The fact that I had a few first-authors in reputed journals was enough; nobody was interested in their contents.
- analog31 5y ago
  At my workplace we assume if you're a good Matlab programmer, you can teach yourself Python in a jiffy. What's a bit tricky is that every resume mentions Matlab and Python. Having a public repo is a useful way to show what you can do.
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    This is the key. Everyone claims Python/MATLAB proficiency, yet there is honestly a vast competency spectrum. A polished public repo, in my experience, will really help you stand out.

inputvolch 5y ago

Those were the only `hard` skills they could come up with? This reads like someone who is trying really hard to validate their life decision to spend many, many years in higher education. I mean: > we still say (and write) things such as ‘heuristics’, ‘confirmation bias’ or ‘family-wise error rate’ If you came out of a PhD and think these are challenging concepts to pick up, or that they somehow make you more valuable than your average technical employee, well, I don't know what to tell you. I generally avoid hiring PhDs onto my teams unless the problem I'm faced with is PRECISELY what they researched. 9 times out of 10 a highly motivated generalist is far more valuable than a PhD.

barefeg 5y ago
Do you have examples of how hiring PhDs can go wrong? I have a similar feeling that generalists are usually better unless the problem is exactly what they studied. But I don’t have number nor stories to back this claim
- rovr138 5y ago
  I'll only comment on this, > Do you have examples of how hiring PhDs can go wrong? Not so much wrong, but there's a curve IMO. This is biased and based on my limited experience. Writing code or working on production systems sometimes they have trouble working the code bases. They can code, but don't necessarily have developed yet the skills to dig into code. I think everyone has this issue starting. There's also a big difference in code from academia to industry. Same with problems. We need a solution and a usable one. It doesn't have to be THE theoretical best thing always. It has to work. For example, you can't just not consider constants in complexities in production. Those constants take time. An example can be Netflix's challenge, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120409/03412518422/why-netflix-never-implemented-algorithm-that-won-netflix-1-million-challenge.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120409/03412518422/why-n... ---- I don't necessarily agree with the generalists part. I think we all specialize over time and have some of the same issues changing language or even frameworks. We just don't have or know the best way of doing things within it yet.

barefeg 5y ago

Most of these skills are not so useful as an individual contributor, but rather for someone in leadership/c-level. But taking those roles as a fresh graduate is very hard. Most established companies would much rather hire someone with actual experience in those roles

ThomPete 5y ago

Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD. This is no different than anyone who spends all their time producing a great album, or building a company or programming a game and I could go on. The PhD if you want to talk about it in generalized terms has no unique properties that can't be accomplished through other means.

rbartelme 5y ago
> Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD. I often equate my Ph.D. with the ability to teach myself how to do things. Ex. going from a wet/dry lab biologist with zero experience in C-style languages, to learning Arduino's flavor of Cpp and the PID control library to run process controls for your wet lab biology experiment.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  That makes it sound like a pretty terrible value, honestly. That kind of "fake it till you make it" plunging into new domains is something people often learn without spending 6 years fighting academia. In fact, your exact example is the kind of project you'd buy for e.g. a teen that likes computers. I still the think the main value of a PhD is learning to wade through adversarial bullshit and bureaucracy and actually deliver something unless your career overlaps heavily with your research.

gwerbret 5y ago

Perhaps I'm definitionally-challenged, but none of the skills listed strike me as "hard" skills. I see a hard skill as being one for which a person receives domain-specific training, e.g. CS major at $SCHOOL learning to program in Rust. In contrast, the soft skills are those obtained in the process of achieving the hard skills, e.g. aforementioned CS major developing teamwork and time management skills while working on a group project. In this vein, none of the skills listed in this article (grant-writing, data analysis, information synthesis, data presentation) are domain-specific.

tpoacher 5y ago
It is a rather soft definition of hard, yes.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  It borders on saying, "it takes general intelligence to do this, and it takes general intelligence to have a job, therefore people who can do this often can do a job."
humanistbot 5y ago
The hard/soft distinction is a bad metaphor that we should stop using, especially when talking about science. Both soft and hard have other meanings that come with so many implicit cultural assumptions. Domain-specific vs domain-independent is far more precise. And if you want to refer to social/communication skills, why not just say that?
- Jensson 5y ago
  Hard means it is easy to measure as they have rigid shape and form. Soft means it is hard to measure as soft items doesn't have shape or other properties similar to hard items. So a hard skill could be "this person knows how to code basic programs that works". A soft skill could be "this person knows how to write code that others find easy to understand and modify". The first is much easier to test and measure, the second is really hard to test but is still valuable. Note that hard/soft has nothing to do with how difficult they are to acquire. Thus the hardest of skills are when the job requires licensing or similar. If you want to hire a doctor then you need someone who is licensed for it. This requirement is 100% rigid and it is very easy to test if they have a licence, the candidate absolutely needs it so there is no compromise to be done.

analog31 5y ago

I have a physics PhD from 30 years ago. I think it's just too hard to generalize. PhDs are still relatively few and far between, come from different disciplines, have different interests, strengths, weaknesses. We're not exactly children when we start a PhD program, so our trajectory is influenced by what we've already done. We come from 100 countries. An odd thing about physics is that we don't have a lot of our own tools or techniques. We're opportunists and we borrow ideas from everywhere. My thesis involved nascent laser technology, mechanics, electronics, theory, programming, data analysis, and a bit of chemistry. Historically, physicists were often the pioneering users of those things before they became branches of engineering. Today, my work still tends to be multidisciplinary. I do a lot of programming, but I've never wanted a software development job per se. I'm willing to work on problems that are ill-defined, that don't fall into anybody's field, and that might not be solvable. Almost all of my work is heavily quantitative. I interact regularly with management, customers, academics, etc. The people at my workplace who are doing that kind of stuff are, by and large, PhDs. They are not necessarily the highest paid employees -- the coders probably have us beat. What I don't know (if I were to anticipate reasonable skepticism) is whether this is a special feature of PhDs, or if we move into this role by necessity due to the lack of marketable hard skills. I don't know if any of my skills, taken in isolation, would be enough to get me a job.

matmatmatmat 5y ago
Physics PhD from about 7 years ago. My impressions are the same as yours.
peter303 5y ago
One percent in US have PhD.
lambdatronics 5y ago
>An odd thing about physics is that we don't have a lot of our own tools or techniques. We're opportunists and we borrow ideas from everywhere. Spot on! Do you mind sharing what kind of role/company you are with, and how you got there from where you started?

lordnacho 5y ago

Honestly it sounds a bit desperate. I'm not dissing the idea of getting a PhD, I think it's a big achievement. But this sort of argument is the kind of thing I heard when I finishing my undergrad, and it wasn't convincing then either. Grant Applications: Very specific academic "skill" which is intimately tied to the bureaucracy of the university system of your particular country or region. It also has a lot to do with things that aren't even in the application: who you know and what they think of you. Whatever org you join later will have some other way for funding to come down, and there are so many varieties of org that you'll just have to learn on that job. Analyzing Data: That's definitely useful, but there's general and specific. There are lots of people who can't do it, and by doing a PhD you definitely show people that you are capable. But, and it's a huge but, you will be spending a heck of a lot of time poring over the evidence on some very specific area of science, with its own conventions and paradigms. When you go and do something else, that won't be relevant. People will of course see that you are generally intelligent, and that's great, but you'll have to learn whole new fields at your next gig. Your issue then is that it's possible to show general intelligence and ability to learn deep material without doing the whole PhD. In fact plenty of people will look at a Bachelor's and conclude the person is smart enough to learn how derivatives work, or how the advertising business works, and so on. Presentations: There's simply no less efficient way to learn presentation skills than to do a hard science PhD. It doesn't make any sense, a PhD takes a lot of work and how much of it is actually doing presentation specifically? Yes, I know they do presentations as part of it. But the kind of presentation skill you want is what your typical smooth talker is good at: confidently being able to talk about something that everyone can relate to. Think Obama or one of those Apple-guy-on-stage things. Are you going to learn that on your PhD? From what I hear, science fields are very very specific and although you are presenting, there's a fair bit of focus on the substance, plus you are presenting to people who are also insiders. If you want to just be less nervous and uhm-and-aw less, there are better ways to practice. There are of course good reasons to get a PhD, such as a desire to learn that specific field. But the cost/benefit of doing it in order to learn generally applicable skills seems off to me.

rbartelme 5y ago
"Grant Applications: Very specific academic "skill" which is intimately tied to the bureaucracy of the university system of your particular country or region. It also has a lot to do with things that aren't even in the application: who you know and what ? they think of you. Whatever org you join later will have some other way for funding to come down, and there are so many varieties of org that you'll just have to learn on that job." I think the country/region part you mention is most relevant here, but I disagree with the overall assessment of grant writing being irrelevant. If you work in a start-up or the R&D division of a company, there's still grant money to be had. This lets companies pursue high risk projects while not jeopardizing overall revenue.

artemisyna 5y ago

The thing articles like this miss is the problem is not will there be some set of skills gained on a given path, but what skills are gained (and at what opportunity cost) versus alternatives.

edw519 5y ago

‘Hard’ skills from our PhDs remain relevant beyond academia Experience in grant-writing, data analysis and presentation will serve you well, say Samantha Baggott and Jonathan McGuire. You can say that about anything. My version (which I firmly believe): ‘Hard’ skills from McDonald's remain relevant beyond foodservice Experience in showing up on time, being trained and prepared, caring about customers, and getting done what must be done will serve you well, says edw519 Edit: Oops, I just noticed a similar (and much more insightful) McDonald's reference in this thread from temporalparts. :-)

antishatter 5y ago

1) seems like a fuckin “duh” 2) obvious conflict of interest, PhD’s writing about how useful PhD’s are?

crispyambulance 5y ago

I think folks are getting hung up on what is or is not a "hard skill". It doesn't matter. Lots of people leave academia with/without a PHD and go to work in places where their degree and the skills/knowledge gained by that pursuit aren't specifically required. How relevant your degree actually is (how much it "helps" you) depends on where you end up and how much you're willing to adapt. Whatever the case, with some things you're going to be just as novice as a 22 year old entry level candidate (in my case, probably even worse). I recall leaving my phd program and months later in "a job" encountering my first "project manager". I literally didn't know that this job title even existed. I blurted out to some co-workers "Who is this person and why did they ask everyone to estimate on the spot when they would be done with their piece of the project, and anyway, how could we even estimate something so uncertain?" Everyone just laughed! ...and so began my years long reality-check where I discovered exactly how green the grass was on the "other side" working in corporate jobs.

rcpt 5y ago

Most important skill from my PhD is the realization that always being wrong and nothing working for months at a time is actually par for the course instead of something to stress over.

jll29 5y ago
When I hire a Ph.D., I hire someone that has undergone something that I know from own experience requires a lot of curiosity, perseverance, drive, self-motivation, self-management, and an ability to communicate well in writing and orally, to convince adversarial audiences, systematic thinking, analytical problem solving skills - each one of them priceless skills.

honkycat 5y ago

I have a buddy who is a lab tech at a university. He is under-paid and under appreciated. He has a masters in physics. Really smart guy! I keep telling him: The math background he has would be a huge asset in CS. He should change careers! He is very skeptical. He feels like he is too old to start( 35 ). At the end of the day, if he doesn't want to change that is his business, and I don't want to badger him. I just feel like he would be great as a ML/Data engineer.

ajkjk 5y ago
He'd be fine at anything non-specialized in tech. Regular application programming is so much easier than physics that it's laughable.

black_13 5y ago

karaterobot 5y ago

Coming out of academia, I would say the biggest thing I had to internalize was that nobody in the for-profit world cares about your interesting findings, unless those interesting findings result in more money. So, apart from just being able to write to a format, I don't think grant proposal skills are transferable, and in some sense they may hurt you if you forget that the case you're making is not about research, it's about generating profits. FWIW, I don't think this a bad thing in many cases. I left academia after I realized that our 4-year NSF project to build collaborative software was never intended to actually improve anyone's life, or even to ever be used outside of our very limited study. It didn't have to be good, or useful, or get adopted by any community in order to succeed. The motivations were completely different: it was to write more papers, and get the next grant, and fund the next set of grad students, so they could build something else that would never be used. Grant proposals all the way down. Yes, basic research is valuable, obviously, my point is just that it's an entirely different, and largely non-transferable worldview from the private sector.

counters 5y ago
IMHO an important point here is that in much of the story as you've described it, there are incredibly valuable skills that just need to be re-dressed. As an academician who was lured to industry by an interesting startup and has worked the gamut of positions from IC to executive, I'm reasonably confident in telling folks that it's all about perspective. If things look upside down, then turn yourself to match! For example: > I don't think grant proposal skills are transferable, Well, they actually probably are. If you work as a domain expert on the business or technical side of an organization, you may need to directly engage with funding agencies, other companies, or some other agent where your ability to (a) understand the audience and what is required to persuade them to support your idea, and (b) quickly execute on the content required to generate the proposal. Extra points if you were one of those pre-tenure faculty who needed to submit a half-dozen grant proposals every quarter, because you've likely built some intuition as to where it's safe to cut corners in your writing and pitching. Sure, in most jobs you may not be writing NSF proposals every week, but the general skill of effective and succinct technical communication is beyond valuable across a wide swath of applications you'll find in industry. > The motivations were completely different: it was to write more papers, and get the next grant ... but that's, in a sense, the same thing as the start-up hustle, is it not? Build the MVP, get that one extra client - not because this next iteration of your product is going to change the world, but it's one more notch on your belt that will look good in the next funding round. Hell, maybe the majority of what you're building on any given iteration is throw-away work, but it's towards an explicit goal. I don't really see the start-up rat race as much different than the grant rat race (for better or for worse - I'm not making a judgment call here).

spamizbad 5y ago

My wife has a PhD and I've always been impressed with her skillset. Although she's not quite ready to join "the industry", there's truly a massive gulf between the quality of research, writing, organization and analysis she can produce compared to what I've encountered in the workforce.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Keep in mind that you probably wouldn't have married her if you thought she was a dolt, so there's quite a bit of selection bias at work here. There are a lot of people with PhDs that are not so impressive, both in industry and in academia.

graycat 5y ago

(1) Financial Math. Some of the comments here have to do with mathematical finance, e.g., the Black-Scholes model. Mathematical finance done with theorems and proofs has some strong prerequisites of measure theory with sigma algebras, Markov processes, Brownian motion, the Radon-Nikodym theorem, conditional expectation, stochastic integration, e.g., Ioannis Karatzas, Steven E. Shreve, Brownian Motion and Stochastic Calculus, Robert M. Blumenthal and Ronald K. Getoor, Markov Processes and Potential Theory. Can also want parabolic partial differential equations and stochastic dynamic programming. In my experience, with a pure/applied math Ph.D. and as a prof in an MBA program, nearly no MBA students or profs have those prerequisites. And with my experience in finance, nearly no one in finance has those prerequisites, either. The people in MBA programs, as students or professors, may have gotten such a background from Cinlar, Shreve, or one of a few more. Bluntly, not many people, a tiny fraction even in pure math, and a good background in pure math is a prerequisite, actually study stochastic processes and stochastic optimal control with a measure theory prerequisite. Anyone X with anything like that math background might want to be careful or that background will scare nearly all potential employers, in finance or anything else, and result in X being ostracized and fired or not hired. (2) Math in MBA Programs. When I was a prof in an MBA program, all the math used was undergraduate level, e.g., with hardly even a calculus prerequisite. (3) Advanced STEM Educations for Non-Academic Jobs. It appears that an advanced education, e.g., in computer science, can help in getting a non-academic job, but the real help is just passing a filter, having proved oneself, and not aiding in doing the job. This situation should not be a surprise: Having exceptionally good qualifications will make a person X exceptional and rare, that is, one out of 100+. Then the other 99 can be afraid and resentful and gang up on X, sabotage X with gossip, keep X out of the loop, etc. (4) Jobs and People with Exceptional Qualifications. It is common for someone X with exceptional qualifications to attempt to use those qualifications to get and do well in a job as an employee. That would mean that person X has a supervisor Y who created the job. But as we can anticipate, it is rare for a supervisor Y to have the exceptional qualifications or to create a job that needs such qualifications. Moreover Y could be uncomfortable, feel threatened by, a subordinate X having and using qualifications Y did not have. In simple terms, commonly Y hires X to apply routine muscle to work conceived by Y. To borrow from a James Bond movie, X is not hired to think and, instead, is hired to do what they are told. (5) Potential of Exceptional Qualifications. For a person with exceptional qualifications that might be powerful and valuable for a career, don't look for a corresponding job created by someone else and, instead, create the corresponding job for yourself. E.g., do a startup. (6) Financial Success. If person X works as an employee, then the supervisor of X knows to the last penny just how much money X is making and usually will do their best to keep down the amount. However, if person X owns a business, then for X the customers replace the supervisor, and it's common for the customers not to know even roughly how much money X is making. So, net, for X with exceptional qualifications that seem powerful and valuable, start and run a successful business and make use of those qualifications. There X can be making a nice fortune, with no supervisor at all and with customers who neither know nor much care how much X is making. (7) Academic Research Jobs. In academic research, the prof is essentially begging a little money from sources with big money, working hard, and then begging journals to let them give away the results of the work for free. So, we might anticipate that such jobs won't pay very well. I concluded that broadly academic jobs were, for someone who wanted to support a family with financial security, financially irresponsible.

peter303 5y ago

Having both a STEM PhD and been software engineering for decades, I'd say article covers the operational aspect of the PhD, i.e. project management skills. The other half of the PhD is knowing what is a significant chuck of doable research. Newbie PhD students often err in selecting topics too small, too large to do in 3 years, or already have been done. This would then correspond in software engineering to a program managers role in selecting features for the next successful release.