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 th

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