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Something went terribly, consistently wrong in his job search for a Stanford CS PhD in that economy to fail to land. I've always found his article to be an odd
by domdip 12y ago
Something went terribly, consistently wrong in his job search for a Stanford CS PhD in that economy to fail to land. I've always found his article to be an odd piece of self-antipromotion. He's publicly admitting he landed a ton of interviews and couldn't find common ground with a single company, which means he either doesn't know how to choose companies or can't carry a conversation for the duration of his interviews.
- ScottBurson 12y agoI just reread that article, and I don't agree. I think the problem is very clear: companies are reluctant to hire a specialist for work outside his field, for the simple reason that they figure he's likely to leave when he finds a job where he can develop his specialty. I think 'santaclaus has a point. If your PhD is in a small specialty like modeling human movement, you would be well advised to be developing industry connections throughout your time in grad school, because there are only a few jobs to be had doing that. (That's not to say that the expertise isn't valuable to the few companies who need it.) Conversely, if your PhD is in a hot area like distributed systems or data mining, you probably don't have to worry about finding a job. It's the fact that he specialized in a small area that made it difficult. And actually, I think he was lucky. I'm sure it was tough getting all those rejections, but in the end he found work in his field. He's probably much better off than he would have been taking some more generic software job.