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Two questions: (1) From your observations, what is the rate of poor coding skills among PhD vs non-PhDs? (ie. the PhD may still be a partial signal for better
by beambot 13y ago
Two questions:
(1) From your observations, what is the rate of poor coding skills among PhD vs non-PhDs? (ie. the PhD may still be a partial signal for better (or worse?) ability.)
(2) A PhD has 4-6 years of experience over a "new grad"... so 0.8X vs 1.0X seems off to me too. Most companies I've spoken w/ allow each year of a PhD to account for 0.5-1.0 years of industry experience depending on the individual's skillsets and the job's responsibilities.
- phamilton 13y agoFog Creek values a PhD at 1 year of experience. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Ladder.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Ladder.html
- beambot 13y agoWhich makes sense in their domain. If you look at the skills they actually care about: software development/programming, user interface design, managing software teams, software testing using scripting/programming tools, marketing software, selling software, system administration. A PhD would (likely) only have done development-programming and testing -- and only (at best) about half-time, since so much of their other responsibilities are coursework, writing, teaching, etc.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoFog Creek will never be google, either.
- morgante 13y agoNor will the vast majority of companies writing software. Hence why PhDs can't get jobs. There are way more of them than companies that actually need their expertise.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoI haven't known any CS phD with job finding issues, beyond the standard..."would I be bored to death doing this job or not."
- RogerL 13y agoYears of experience don't matter (IMO). I will pay you based on the value you bring. PhDs have demonstrated the ability to read the literature and conduct research under supervision. That is not necessarily very valuable (knowledge gained during that process may or may not be very valuable). And, honestly, the research often seems very mickey-mouse compared to real world problems, of the "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" variety. That's nice, but does it get me to launch with the feature sets I need? If not, your value is not high. If so, well, name your price.
- Lewisham 13y agoI think you're heavily discounting/missing "ability to work independently" which I think is a huge win for most softeng jobs. If they can code (if), you'll find PhD holders need very little hand-holding to get stuff done.
- quanticle 13y ago>I think you're heavily discounting "ability to work independently" Really? I mean, anecdotal evidence and all, but I haven't found that PhDs can actually work more independently in a commercial software setting than non-PhDs. I think it's because academic settings are just too different from commercial settings. In academia, your project is your own. You're responsible for it, from start to finish. But in commercial software, your project is often just one component or subcomponent of a much larger system. This requires a much greater level of communication and cooperation with other developers and business-people. So yes, a PhD may be able to work more independently on a project that allows for independent work. But most commercial software development is a highly cooperative activity, where the sort of independence that PhD holders exercise can often turn into being a loose cannon.
- Schwolop 13y agoSo take your 20 man project - all of it - and give the entirety to the Ph.D. In fact, since you'll be saving so much money, get three Ph.D.s to work on it simultaneously and independently. In fact, tell them it's first to publish - sorry, I mean launch - and you'll probably see them work 24/7 until it's done. In fact, what you've just done is start an industry funded research project. You should now go to a university, "collaborate" such that they get to put their name on the project, and you get to harvest their Ph.D. candidates for minimum wage, and you're laughing all the way to the bank!
- dchichkov 13y agoFrom my experience I would NOT call PhDs coding skills as poor. It is just that the coding style is so different. And tend to go toward extremes. From ad-hoc approaches to the extremes of elaborations that attempt to solve every possible future problem. Sometimes without common sense, laziness and foresight of just a regular engineer. There are reasons for that. It's just that the research grade code IS different. And labs tend to have their own cultures and approaches. Sometimes to the extreme of writing in their own languages. But in some cases it can be very advantageous.
- peterhunt 13y ago> From ad-hoc approaches to the extremes of elaborations that attempt to solve every possible future problem. If you're writing code that needs to be maintained (i.e. not just run a few times to generate results for a paper, but read and written by several different people over time) this is pretty bad and leads to much more technical debt than would otherwise be accumulated. This is the type of thing you learn to avoid by working in industry a few years and is why experienced ICs are paid more than new grads.
- philangist 13y agoIC? What's that mean?
- nostrademons 13y agoIndividual Contributor (as opposed to manager).
- jimbokun 13y agoMy group just hired a C.S. Ph.D. to write code. Her coding skills were fine, but lacked some things very common in industry experience, like relational databases, Object Relational Mapping frameworks, distributed version control systems, and continuous integration tools. None of this has been a problem. She has only been on our team a couple of weeks, but there was no delay to her being able to contribute to our code base relative to any other developers we have hired.