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> It turns out that many of the things you need to thrive in a PhD program translate to bigtech engineering needfs. This is contrary to my life experience (ev
by aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> It turns out that many of the things you need to thrive in a PhD program translate to bigtech engineering needfs.
This is contrary to my life experience (even for math or physics PhDs).
What makes a great PhD thesis is to question an insane lot of assumptions of deep results in the field of your PhD thesis, and show that if you base these on a very different foundation, these results generalize to whole different areas; e.g. you found a bridge between seemingly unrelated areas of studies.
On the other hand, managers deeply hate it if you question a lot of assumptions behind the work that you do, whether it is some special case of something deeper, and aren't obedient to the manager's leadership.
In other words: a great PhD program teaches you to think and work all the time on things managers will hate you for.
- dekhn 1y agoCertainly a subset of PhDs who work at bigtech fail to have any impact. I've seen a few brilliant but inflexible people hit up against the immovable parts of a corporation. I've also seen brilliant PhDs who refuse to study for a software engineering interview... and then fail miserably. But by and large, based on hundreds of individuals, I've found that quantitative PhDs can drop into many SWE roles and contribute- both mundane improvements to code quality, and massive improvements to the foundations of projects.
- znpy 1y ago> I've seen a few brilliant but inflexible people hit up against the immovable parts of a corporation. With such an attitude it would have only been a matter of time before they hit up the immovable part of academia as well.