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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.