I find your experience with PhDs fascinating because it's been the exact opposite of my experience with graduate school. My graduate program has been far more

I find your experience with PhDs fascinating because it's been the exact opposite of my experience with graduate school. My graduate program has been far more production oriented than any of the private sector work I've ever done. In the private sector, I've been given a list of specifications and told to report back in a week on what progress I'd made. In research, on the other hand, a professor would hand me the requirements and then stand there until I delivered the code. If the professor was on a looser deadline, he might take a chair while he waited me. Most deadlines are measured in hours, instead of days, so the thought of a PhD not having his code finished in a month is baffling to me. Of course, I'll also be the first to admit that this still produces some poor production habits. When you have a twenty minute deadline to write code in a language you've never seen before on during your first ever experience on a VAX, you tend to skip the unit tests. And the source control. And the comments. And the white space. But, I'd like to think that, if I had an extra hour, I'd go back for all of that.