I don't know the author, so I cannot say how his interviews went. In general I think you have to take control of the interviews and just show the person why you

I don't know the author, so I cannot say how his interviews went. In general I think you have to take control of the interviews and just show the person why you are valuable. It's hard to find talent; the person interviewing wants to like you, if for no other reason than she can get back to coding. The PhDs that I've interviewed have applied for very senior positions, yet not brought all of the skills needed. Which is more than jusr abstract thought. You need to turn out code that is maintainable and readable by the team. You need to ruthlessly reduce the problem and algorithms to a level that allows you to launch before you run out of money. Far more than being a thinker or researcher, you need to be an engineer. You need to be very, very productive. And so on. I'm not sure what the answer is, but there is a pretty big gulf. You look at the projects and okay, it's somewhat interesting, but impractical. You ask them how they'd solve a problem that you are trying to hire them to solve, and you get "I'd conduct a study..." when we have 6 months to market and your study would take a year, and probably not provide definitive results. It's just a different mind set. I can't afford to bring you into a senior role and wait while you learn to be an engineer, while you learn to code at a higher level than 'University code' (a disparaging quote about the quality of the code Sergy and Larry brought to Google) and so on. We have a real, hard problem, and need an extremely focused, skilled, multidimensional person to perform it. I've yet to come across a PhD that made me think they could do it. "I can learn to do that". Well, sure. Anybody can, it's just that so few do. Only a small handful of people actually produce at a high level in the ways I'm talking about. I don't want to bet on you being one of the few.