> Right now I'm relatively new in my position, and it was a real torture to understand the system, because nobody seems to be able to explain it in a linear way

> Right now I'm relatively new in my position, and it was a real torture to understand the system, because nobody seems to be able to explain it in a linear way. This is... not surprising at all? Are you new to industry? Have you only worked at greenfield startups? Particularly true for products with significant R&D components, btw. > Ok, where I'm now it seems a PhD can be bought around the corner for 2 cents. Some advice for hiring people with advanced degrees: 1. The masters degree itself is not a good signal. Especially in CS, MS programs are viewed as pure revenue streams and explicitly treated differently from other programs in terms of rigor and signalling value. 2. The PhD degree itself is not a good signal. For example, the University of Phoenix awards PhDs. 3. Some CS subfields are worse than others in terms of PhD signal:noise. Machine learning is a big abuser -- faculty at lower ranked programs can often get away with using PhD students as super cheap entry-level SWEs/SREs ("graduate student descent"). There are some subfields of CS where a PhD is a better signal. Actually, this can happen at higher-ranked universities as well. So, what to do? 1. For masters degrees without a thesis component, I'm not really sure. Treat it as a new grad who took some extra coursework. 2. The great thing about a PhD (or Masters with thesis) is that the output is a 100+ page document. You can read usually about 10 pages of that document (intro, conclusion, fist page or so of each chapter) and have an immediate sense for how well the person communicates.