As someone who hires quite a few programmers, I think part of the problem is that there are skills that are considered basic requirements for industry jobs that

As someone who hires quite a few programmers, I think part of the problem is that there are skills that are considered basic requirements for industry jobs that PhD students aren't likely to get as part of their studies. TL;DR Software engineering is a distinct skill set from computer science and it's very possible to excel in CS while largely ignoring the former discipline. For example, writing code in a team rather than on your own or in a very small group. This involves learning the importance of small changesets, coding conventions and readable/understandable code, among other things. Also, coding in the industry involves a lot of learning to use tools and techniques that others have developed and far less developing those things on your own. A ton of the code that gets written in the industry is glue code between well-known solutions or boilerplate for a well-known framework. None of this is to say that a PhD can't learn those things or even hasn't learned those things by the time they interview, but I can confirm from our interview process that there are a lot of them that haven't and I'd rather hire a fresh CS grad who will be cheaper and likely be more humble rather than struggling to convince a PhD that those things are important.