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Well someone forward all these overlooked PhDs my way, because when I start my own company I'll have a good selection for a good price then. (Edit: With some o

Well someone forward all these overlooked PhDs my way, because when I start my own company I'll have a good selection for a good price then. (Edit: With some of the replies, I feel I should clarify I am about halfway through getting my own PhD in chemical engineering. I was actually kind of poking fun at the article's assumptions.)

squintychino 13y ago
More education != More value. We currently have 3 PhD's that were hired in our department. No actual experience in the job/field, yet they were hired on based solely on their degree. They are doing work than an entry-level employee would be doing. What is the value for their overpaid salary? Their actual job performance? Or the piece of paper that says they went to school for X number of years? You can have those overlooked PhD's. They are overlooked for a reason.
- tostitos1979 13y ago
  You realize every PhD isn't the same? People with PhDs in systems are good at building shit. They might very well suck being data scientists. Similarly, someone with a Machine Learning PhD might suck at fault-tolerant middleware. P.S. The anti-PhD meme on HN really needs to stop.
  - shadowfox 13y ago
    > The anti-PhD meme on HN really needs to stop Well. The most common way to feel superior is to put other things down. It just happens to be focused on PhDs when academia related stuff comes up :P
GuiA 13y ago
Often times, PhDs do a PhD because they are deeply interested in a very specific topic. (like, really really specific) As such, unless your startup tries to solve a problem in a PhD-level domain, it's unlikely that they'd be excited to work for you. If you want to build the next Kinect, you might find plenty of fresh PhDs who totally rock computer vision research. But if you're building a fairly generic business/consumer app, it's going to be harder.
- gradstudent 13y ago
  > If you want to build the next Kinect, you might find plenty of fresh PhDs who totally rock computer vision research. But if you're building a fairly generic business/consumer app, it's going to be harder. This. After spending many years becoming a world-class expert in X, it's a difficult proposition to go work in the back-office for some boring consultancy firm or SME.

squintychino 13y ago

More education != More value. We currently have 3 PhD's that were hired in our department. No actual experience in the job/field, yet they were hired on based solely on their degree. They are doing work than an entry-level employee would be doing. What is the value for their overpaid salary? Their actual job performance? Or the piece of paper that says they went to school for X number of years? You can have those overlooked PhD's. They are overlooked for a reason.

tostitos1979 13y ago
You realize every PhD isn't the same? People with PhDs in systems are good at building shit. They might very well suck being data scientists. Similarly, someone with a Machine Learning PhD might suck at fault-tolerant middleware. P.S. The anti-PhD meme on HN really needs to stop.
- shadowfox 13y ago
  > The anti-PhD meme on HN really needs to stop Well. The most common way to feel superior is to put other things down. It just happens to be focused on PhDs when academia related stuff comes up :P

GuiA 13y ago

Often times, PhDs do a PhD because they are deeply interested in a very specific topic. (like, really really specific) As such, unless your startup tries to solve a problem in a PhD-level domain, it's unlikely that they'd be excited to work for you. If you want to build the next Kinect, you might find plenty of fresh PhDs who totally rock computer vision research. But if you're building a fairly generic business/consumer app, it's going to be harder.

gradstudent 13y ago
> If you want to build the next Kinect, you might find plenty of fresh PhDs who totally rock computer vision research. But if you're building a fairly generic business/consumer app, it's going to be harder. This. After spending many years becoming a world-class expert in X, it's a difficult proposition to go work in the back-office for some boring consultancy firm or SME.