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you know what I didn't see in your reply? All of the large scale coding projects you implemented and put into production for a while. The big problem is that Ph

you know what I didn't see in your reply? All of the large scale coding projects you implemented and put into production for a while. The big problem is that PhD/MS in CS is just an extension of BS, except you now have 4+ more years of bad coding practice under your belt. From my experience, coming out of school people need to relearn how to code in the real world. It is no more assignments you get functional, or in the case of PhD's mostly throw-away software/hacks that does something for your thesis. This is what I mean by skills that I need. Taking a bunch of random classes is nice for you, but none of them teach you how to write code or design systems in the business world. At least bachelor degrees only have ~4 years of bad coding behind them, and they have all of the fundamentals at that point necessary to be great software developers. Adding another 4+ years of bad coding on top of that does not really help you, this is why we pay PhD/MS candidates the same as a BS CS, because from our perspective they are the same!

jonemo 14y ago
I was writing about grad school. Talking about my hobby projects that have been "in production for a while" would have been out of context. We can talk about those elsewhere if you want. Also note that this was about Mechanical Engineering. We Mechanical Engineers are indeed not very strong at writing "large scale" enterprise level software, even after years of industry experience. The only CS PhD graduate so far from our lab wrote [1] and this seems to have been not too bad in terms of quality because it had thousands of happy users and is now a successful commercial product. The point of my comment was that you, and many others here and elsewhere, seem to assume that completing a PhD requires very specialized work only, which is wrong in my experience. I did not make any comment about whether PhD graduates have the skills that match the requirements of the positions that you are trying to fill. Your focus is exclusively on coding habits and you do not seem to assign any value on other skills. It appears to me that you are seeking highly specialized people whose only expertise is the production of high quality code. In that context it seems rather amusing that you are suggesting that others are too specialized to be useful. Maybe PhD graduates are in fact too generalist to be a good match for your positions? [1] http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa
tensor 14y ago
And you are in the vast minority in paying PhD/MS candidates the same as BS grads. I can say with confidence that you've hired the absolute worst most desperate PhD/MS candidates. This isn't something I'm making up, it's widely available salary statistics which as a "hiring manager" you should be intimately familiar with. Academics work on real world problems, a great many solutions which you use daily. They care about accuracy, otherwise the science is bad. The only thing they don't design for, and this is because of the nature of research, not bad practice, is sustainable code that you can build on. Why try to build a great design when your requirements can change weekly? All you will do is slow down your research work and end up with a jumbled mess. The right thing to do when exploring is write quick correct code with little thought to sustainable design. If you find an idea that works, rewrite it into something you can maintain. All you've demonstrated here is your ignorance both of your own domain as well as that of others. You don't understand what PhD/MS grads are going for, are unable to hire good ones, and don't understand what it takes to research new ideas. That latter point probably means that your company is not at all innovative.

jonemo 14y ago

I was writing about grad school. Talking about my hobby projects that have been "in production for a while" would have been out of context. We can talk about those elsewhere if you want. Also note that this was about Mechanical Engineering. We Mechanical Engineers are indeed not very strong at writing "large scale" enterprise level software, even after years of industry experience. The only CS PhD graduate so far from our lab wrote [1] and this seems to have been not too bad in terms of quality because it had thousands of happy users and is now a successful commercial product. The point of my comment was that you, and many others here and elsewhere, seem to assume that completing a PhD requires very specialized work only, which is wrong in my experience. I did not make any comment about whether PhD graduates have the skills that match the requirements of the positions that you are trying to fill. Your focus is exclusively on coding habits and you do not seem to assign any value on other skills. It appears to me that you are seeking highly specialized people whose only expertise is the production of high quality code. In that context it seems rather amusing that you are suggesting that others are too specialized to be useful. Maybe PhD graduates are in fact too generalist to be a good match for your positions? [1] http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa

tensor 14y ago

And you are in the vast minority in paying PhD/MS candidates the same as BS grads. I can say with confidence that you've hired the absolute worst most desperate PhD/MS candidates. This isn't something I'm making up, it's widely available salary statistics which as a "hiring manager" you should be intimately familiar with. Academics work on real world problems, a great many solutions which you use daily. They care about accuracy, otherwise the science is bad. The only thing they don't design for, and this is because of the nature of research, not bad practice, is sustainable code that you can build on. Why try to build a great design when your requirements can change weekly? All you will do is slow down your research work and end up with a jumbled mess. The right thing to do when exploring is write quick correct code with little thought to sustainable design. If you find an idea that works, rewrite it into something you can maintain. All you've demonstrated here is your ignorance both of your own domain as well as that of others. You don't understand what PhD/MS grads are going for, are unable to hire good ones, and don't understand what it takes to research new ideas. That latter point probably means that your company is not at all innovative.