Certainly 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

Certainly 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.