6 ms·

Software jobs, PhDs and over-qualification

22 points by paulsb 17y ago

puzzle-out 17y ago
I'm wondering how many HN users have phds. Poll time anyone? (or has it already been done).
- jzachary 17y ago
  I do. (I've been a lurker on HN for a long time.)
- adw 17y ago
  There are three of us working at the startup I work at, and we've all got PhDs; chemistry, chemical physics and computational mineralogy respectively. What we're doing has very little to do with any of the science we perpetrated, though!
lallysingh 17y ago
Odd, (I'm still finishing my PhD) I haven't gotten any such negative feedback. OTOH, it helps if: 1. Your PhD has real-world applicability. Which is not hard. 2. Your potential employers could apply those skills. 3. You can actually code pretty well, too. I think this third item is often the issue. PhDs often have underdeveloped programming abilities compared to industry vets the same age -- too much classwork, not enough larger-scale projects. There are good ways around this: graduate research assistantships that require reasonable code, collaborative research that requires you build your part of a system, internships, etc. At least for the places that I've worked and do work now, if they think you can get the job done, you're in good shape. Then again, I don't apply to the 1000-monkeys on 1000 typewriter coder/body shops, either.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I get the impression 3 is a problem. From the discussion thread where the job seeker asks for help: Someone offering a helpful suggestion: Dude...if you have a PhD...there is no excuse for you to not be able to remember your C coding with barely a day's effort. [This refers to job interview questions about the complexity of linked lists and such.] The PhD having job seeker: ...there's a mental mode where you're doing those low-level things and you do lose it after college and after not working any more with C/C++. Reviewing it doesn't help that much. I dislike the notion that I just went to the job and then realized I had to practice. That's not to say that things are bad out there. When I got my Ph.D., recruiters would cold call me ("Want to work in the financial industry?"). Now I'm actively looking and rarely get called back. I guess I need to network a bit more...
  - billswift 17y ago
    Yes. Programming is a complex skill, like using math or a foreign language, if you want to stay good at it, you MUST stay in practice.
- hopeless 17y ago
  Coding is not necessarily part of a PhD (even in Comp Sci!) and programming well certainly isn't. No one will ever look at that code, inspect, test it, document it or complain when any of those things are missing My rather opinionated thoughts on my 3 year failure of a PhD is here: http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-and-about-my-phd/ http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-... When I applied for software engineering jobs the recruiters ignored my 3 years of Java/Python programming for the PhD and my 4 years of embedded Java programming for research labs. All that counts is the time when you were delivering code to paying customers in a commercial setting :(
kurtosis 17y ago
Wow this is really depressing to contemplate. Has anyone here been through the experience where you went to grad school for curiosity and found that it made you unemployable? I really fear this outcome. I went to graduate school because I looked up at the end of my undergrad degree and realized that my knowledge of Physics was very shallow. I was pretty obvious just from the numbers I was extremely unlikely to get any kind of academic employment, but I decided that it didn't matter because I was sure I could talk to someone and convince them that I was a "practical" person. In another year I'm going to look seriously for a job and this story scares me. Is it really this hard to find a job solving hard practical problems with computers? Would someone seriously say that it's "too theoretical" to have experience building scientific instruments and software to control them in a lab, software that by construction has a real user? It really worries me that someone with a PhD in soft eng from CMU had such a hard time. This doesn't leave me much hope of crossing fields.
- dinkumthinkum 17y ago
  I think the person is more wildly confused than anything else. I don't know of any PhD students having trouble getting jobs. Somehow this person has gotten the impression that what you do with a PhD is go out and get an entry level job prorgramming RoR or something. That is not the case.
  - cousin_it 17y ago
    I agree that people can enter and follow the programming career path easily without a PhD. Completing a PhD equips you to follow your dream of science, of being a patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night, but it doesn't exactly help you make money. Like studying classical music for ten years and then complaining you can't get a job: dude, I hate to upset you, but a "job" wasn't the point at all.
    - whacked_new 17y ago
      One thing I realized was that the PhD isn't what makes you the patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night. It is the brilliant theorist that makes you the PhD and the patent clerk by day. This is true, at least in Einstein's case. Or, s/patent clerk/surfer/g, s/Einstein/Garrett Lisi/g But the romanticism has gone out of proportion.
dinkumthinkum 17y ago
I don't understand this. Why is a recent PhD trying to get entry level programming jobs?
edw519 17y ago
"usually employers look for someone that codes like a robot" Wrong. Usually employers look for someone to get the frickin job done without rethinking the problem. Classic example right now: I have PhD in Strategic Planning telling me to make the algorithm calculate the Economic Order Quantity when creating the Purchase Order. The Buyer immediately gave me 4 reasons why that will never work in the real world: the vendor will have to interrupt set-ups for plan changes, the bank will never approve that line of credit, the rev level may change before the end of the run, and oh, by the way, that many won't fit on the truck. "...trying to get a plain ol’ developer position..." You have an attitude problem. There's nothing "plain ol'" about what we do every day. While you were busy in your ivory tower for 8 years, someone had to keep the world moving. "companies want the 20 year-olds to code quick and turn out an app with a 6-month lifetime" On what planet? You were obviously too busy in college to actually find out what really goes on in the real world. "6-8 years in graduate school under constant stress torn your ego into to pieces" Poor baby. Get a job. Feed, clothe, and shelter a family. Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you. For those of us who have been doing this for years, earning a PhD sounds like a vacation.
- miloshh 17y ago
  As someone just finishing Ph.D. that also had industry jobs, I can say most of what you say seems wrong. There indeed are plain old developer positions, consisting of e.g. making some frontend talk to some backend - most real-world corporate programming is like that. "Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you" - this is exactly what you have to do in a Ph.D. program all the time - you have coauthors on papers that have to be shipped, and yours and their future depends on it. In the corporate world, you also have to deliver, but at least what you're doing is well known to be possible. In academia you have a constant feeling that you might be against an impossible problem, and the results will never come together. Plus in the corporate world, you can work 9am-7pm at most, rather than 11am-2pm as in grad school. And the pay is 4x higher. Now what sounds more like a vacation? (Of course, here I was referring to a PhD in Computer Science. I don't know what's Strategic Planning, so I can't judge there.)
  - 17y ago
angstrom 17y ago
Even though you are screaming at your prospective employer, saying “yes I’ve done all the crazy stuff during the PhD, but now just want a job to code to feed my family”, they may not hire you not so much of over-qualification, but rather over-thinking. Case in point, if you want a lower level position, remove the PhD from your resume. Stop over-thinking the problem. It's a perfectly valid solution to say you have a masters or bachelors instead so you can feed your family. Employers are perfectly valid in excluding PhDs if they are concerned about over qualifications costing more or leading to boredom.
troystribling 17y ago
I am a PhD, in physics, that left academic research about 10 years ago for a programming career. As a researcher I studied Computational Fluid Dynamics. All of my programming jobs have been in network management or a related field. My Ph.D has been a plus at every job I have held. Over qualification has never been an issue. I left academia for two reasons: pay and a preference for programming to the drudgery of publication. I started my programming career near the peak of 2000 tech bubble and had doubled my salary within with a couple of years. Six figure programming salaries are far more common than six figure salaries in academic research. An additional bonus which I did not anticipate was the competitive advantage I would have. Competition for academic positions is quite intense involving many capable people. This is likely why salaries remain low. In programming the typical skill level is much lower.
electromagnetic 17y ago
The thing I always wonder about is 'PhD stupidity'. Basically, PhD's usually seem to get a sense of entitlement, which may put them at a disadvantage when entering the real world and leaving the academic world. What the author seems to be misunderstanding, is that employers aren't impressed by a PhD for an entry level job (actually it probably makes them very hesitant). However, the PhD is likely to get trapped into the whole 'I have a PhD so I'm important' mentality that seems to go around, so they never figure out that the PhD is stopping them getting a real job. I think the other major problem is that people take PhD's that won't help them get a job. I've known forensic scientists who've been stuck in deli counters, because there's only a handful of available jobs in the entire western world. I've known journalist grads who've been flat out rejected because of their degree, because it teaches them poor skills (the main skill desired now is the ability to write with personality, which journalism courses actively discourage). So I'm sure there's a lot of ways that can contribute to a PhD making you unemployable, however it's probably always down to poor choice or poor judgment. Personally I'd love to get a PhD in physics out of pure interest. However, the one thing I'd worry about, and I've told to friends going the PhD route, is that taking a PhD keeps you out of the career field for 10+ years. So you have to really evaluate if 10+ years of experience is better for you career wise than a PhD and 0 years experience, because all the fields I'm interested in (career wise, not academically) don't give a damn if you have a PhD, so even though I'd like to have a degree in something I'm not going to waste my time.
- dinkumthinkum 17y ago
  I don't think you seem to know what a PhD is about.
geebee 17y ago
I think we need to rethink what we mean by "overqualified". An MD isn't necessarily overqualified for a job as an RN - in fact, such a person might be underqualified. Just because you have "higher" credentials doesn't necessarily mean your credentials are a superset of what is needed.

22 points by paulsb 17y ago

puzzle-out 17y ago

I'm wondering how many HN users have phds. Poll time anyone? (or has it already been done).

jzachary 17y ago
I do. (I've been a lurker on HN for a long time.)
adw 17y ago
There are three of us working at the startup I work at, and we've all got PhDs; chemistry, chemical physics and computational mineralogy respectively. What we're doing has very little to do with any of the science we perpetrated, though!

lallysingh 17y ago

Odd, (I'm still finishing my PhD) I haven't gotten any such negative feedback. OTOH, it helps if: 1. Your PhD has real-world applicability. Which is not hard. 2. Your potential employers could apply those skills. 3. You can actually code pretty well, too. I think this third item is often the issue. PhDs often have underdeveloped programming abilities compared to industry vets the same age -- too much classwork, not enough larger-scale projects. There are good ways around this: graduate research assistantships that require reasonable code, collaborative research that requires you build your part of a system, internships, etc. At least for the places that I've worked and do work now, if they think you can get the job done, you're in good shape. Then again, I don't apply to the 1000-monkeys on 1000 typewriter coder/body shops, either.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
I get the impression 3 is a problem. From the discussion thread where the job seeker asks for help: Someone offering a helpful suggestion: Dude...if you have a PhD...there is no excuse for you to not be able to remember your C coding with barely a day's effort. [This refers to job interview questions about the complexity of linked lists and such.] The PhD having job seeker: ...there's a mental mode where you're doing those low-level things and you do lose it after college and after not working any more with C/C++. Reviewing it doesn't help that much. I dislike the notion that I just went to the job and then realized I had to practice. That's not to say that things are bad out there. When I got my Ph.D., recruiters would cold call me ("Want to work in the financial industry?"). Now I'm actively looking and rarely get called back. I guess I need to network a bit more...
- billswift 17y ago
  Yes. Programming is a complex skill, like using math or a foreign language, if you want to stay good at it, you MUST stay in practice.
hopeless 17y ago
Coding is not necessarily part of a PhD (even in Comp Sci!) and programming well certainly isn't. No one will ever look at that code, inspect, test it, document it or complain when any of those things are missing My rather opinionated thoughts on my 3 year failure of a PhD is here: http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-and-about-my-phd/ http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-... When I applied for software engineering jobs the recruiters ignored my 3 years of Java/Python programming for the PhD and my 4 years of embedded Java programming for research labs. All that counts is the time when you were delivering code to paying customers in a commercial setting :(

kurtosis 17y ago

Wow this is really depressing to contemplate. Has anyone here been through the experience where you went to grad school for curiosity and found that it made you unemployable? I really fear this outcome. I went to graduate school because I looked up at the end of my undergrad degree and realized that my knowledge of Physics was very shallow. I was pretty obvious just from the numbers I was extremely unlikely to get any kind of academic employment, but I decided that it didn't matter because I was sure I could talk to someone and convince them that I was a "practical" person. In another year I'm going to look seriously for a job and this story scares me. Is it really this hard to find a job solving hard practical problems with computers? Would someone seriously say that it's "too theoretical" to have experience building scientific instruments and software to control them in a lab, software that by construction has a real user? It really worries me that someone with a PhD in soft eng from CMU had such a hard time. This doesn't leave me much hope of crossing fields.

dinkumthinkum 17y ago
I think the person is more wildly confused than anything else. I don't know of any PhD students having trouble getting jobs. Somehow this person has gotten the impression that what you do with a PhD is go out and get an entry level job prorgramming RoR or something. That is not the case.
- cousin_it 17y ago
  I agree that people can enter and follow the programming career path easily without a PhD. Completing a PhD equips you to follow your dream of science, of being a patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night, but it doesn't exactly help you make money. Like studying classical music for ten years and then complaining you can't get a job: dude, I hate to upset you, but a "job" wasn't the point at all.
  - whacked_new 17y ago
    One thing I realized was that the PhD isn't what makes you the patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night. It is the brilliant theorist that makes you the PhD and the patent clerk by day. This is true, at least in Einstein's case. Or, s/patent clerk/surfer/g, s/Einstein/Garrett Lisi/g But the romanticism has gone out of proportion.

dinkumthinkum 17y ago

I don't understand this. Why is a recent PhD trying to get entry level programming jobs?

edw519 17y ago

"usually employers look for someone that codes like a robot" Wrong. Usually employers look for someone to get the frickin job done without rethinking the problem. Classic example right now: I have PhD in Strategic Planning telling me to make the algorithm calculate the Economic Order Quantity when creating the Purchase Order. The Buyer immediately gave me 4 reasons why that will never work in the real world: the vendor will have to interrupt set-ups for plan changes, the bank will never approve that line of credit, the rev level may change before the end of the run, and oh, by the way, that many won't fit on the truck. "...trying to get a plain ol’ developer position..." You have an attitude problem. There's nothing "plain ol'" about what we do every day. While you were busy in your ivory tower for 8 years, someone had to keep the world moving. "companies want the 20 year-olds to code quick and turn out an app with a 6-month lifetime" On what planet? You were obviously too busy in college to actually find out what really goes on in the real world. "6-8 years in graduate school under constant stress torn your ego into to pieces" Poor baby. Get a job. Feed, clothe, and shelter a family. Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you. For those of us who have been doing this for years, earning a PhD sounds like a vacation.

miloshh 17y ago
As someone just finishing Ph.D. that also had industry jobs, I can say most of what you say seems wrong. There indeed are plain old developer positions, consisting of e.g. making some frontend talk to some backend - most real-world corporate programming is like that. "Deliver something every day to someone who is depending on you" - this is exactly what you have to do in a Ph.D. program all the time - you have coauthors on papers that have to be shipped, and yours and their future depends on it. In the corporate world, you also have to deliver, but at least what you're doing is well known to be possible. In academia you have a constant feeling that you might be against an impossible problem, and the results will never come together. Plus in the corporate world, you can work 9am-7pm at most, rather than 11am-2pm as in grad school. And the pay is 4x higher. Now what sounds more like a vacation? (Of course, here I was referring to a PhD in Computer Science. I don't know what's Strategic Planning, so I can't judge there.)
- 17y ago

angstrom 17y ago

Even though you are screaming at your prospective employer, saying “yes I’ve done all the crazy stuff during the PhD, but now just want a job to code to feed my family”, they may not hire you not so much of over-qualification, but rather over-thinking. Case in point, if you want a lower level position, remove the PhD from your resume. Stop over-thinking the problem. It's a perfectly valid solution to say you have a masters or bachelors instead so you can feed your family. Employers are perfectly valid in excluding PhDs if they are concerned about over qualifications costing more or leading to boredom.

troystribling 17y ago

I am a PhD, in physics, that left academic research about 10 years ago for a programming career. As a researcher I studied Computational Fluid Dynamics. All of my programming jobs have been in network management or a related field. My Ph.D has been a plus at every job I have held. Over qualification has never been an issue. I left academia for two reasons: pay and a preference for programming to the drudgery of publication. I started my programming career near the peak of 2000 tech bubble and had doubled my salary within with a couple of years. Six figure programming salaries are far more common than six figure salaries in academic research. An additional bonus which I did not anticipate was the competitive advantage I would have. Competition for academic positions is quite intense involving many capable people. This is likely why salaries remain low. In programming the typical skill level is much lower.

electromagnetic 17y ago

The thing I always wonder about is 'PhD stupidity'. Basically, PhD's usually seem to get a sense of entitlement, which may put them at a disadvantage when entering the real world and leaving the academic world. What the author seems to be misunderstanding, is that employers aren't impressed by a PhD for an entry level job (actually it probably makes them very hesitant). However, the PhD is likely to get trapped into the whole 'I have a PhD so I'm important' mentality that seems to go around, so they never figure out that the PhD is stopping them getting a real job. I think the other major problem is that people take PhD's that won't help them get a job. I've known forensic scientists who've been stuck in deli counters, because there's only a handful of available jobs in the entire western world. I've known journalist grads who've been flat out rejected because of their degree, because it teaches them poor skills (the main skill desired now is the ability to write with personality, which journalism courses actively discourage). So I'm sure there's a lot of ways that can contribute to a PhD making you unemployable, however it's probably always down to poor choice or poor judgment. Personally I'd love to get a PhD in physics out of pure interest. However, the one thing I'd worry about, and I've told to friends going the PhD route, is that taking a PhD keeps you out of the career field for 10+ years. So you have to really evaluate if 10+ years of experience is better for you career wise than a PhD and 0 years experience, because all the fields I'm interested in (career wise, not academically) don't give a damn if you have a PhD, so even though I'd like to have a degree in something I'm not going to waste my time.

dinkumthinkum 17y ago
I don't think you seem to know what a PhD is about.

geebee 17y ago

I think we need to rethink what we mean by "overqualified". An MD isn't necessarily overqualified for a job as an RN - in fact, such a person might be underqualified. Just because you have "higher" credentials doesn't necessarily mean your credentials are a superset of what is needed.