Getting a good job

"Eric J. Korpela" wrote: Perhaps. After all, the field that I received *my* Ph.D. in was CS, and the joke at the time was that only non-sciences tack "science" onto the end of the name of their field, hence "computer science", "social science", "space science" and the like. You don't often hear people refer to "physics science", "chemistry science" and the like :-) YMMV. I'm an empiricist; I call 'em as I see 'em. Is the typical Ph.D. more clueful than the typical four year? Sure. Is the typical Ph.D. more clueful that a four year with four years of experience? Generally not. It really has a lot to do with the dumbing down of CS coursework since the late 70's. I haven't observed that any sort of degree or lack thereof immunizes against being out of touch with reality. Something else about this statement puzzles me; there's the implication that Ph.D. != engineer. I hold one in my field and identify as an engineer, so I'm an existence proof the the intersection of the two is a non-null set. Again, YMMV. In my experience there's nothing about someone having a Ph.D. which makes them particularly more adept at becoming facile with a new problem space than anyone else. If you're asserting that a new Ph.D. is better equipped that a new four-year I'll agree, but again, if the assertion is that the new Ph.D. is better off than the four-year-plus-four of experience it simply doesn't match my experience. Both those statements apply to anyone, regardless of what sort of degrees they might hold. Uh, no. That fits in the category of "don't keep them around". It's technicians that I expect that sort of behavior from, and they don't come into my office, they come into the office of someone four steps down the food chain. So-called "self-starting" is required of everyone. The person I was referring to was not and is not an idiot. They are a counterexample to what seems to be an assertion that Ph.D.'s a mythically endowed with something which makes them superior to people who don't have them. I have *no doubt* that in some fields this is the case, but it's not in my industry segment. Most innovation in my field comes *from* industry, not academia, so anyone who would choose to spend another four years in that setting is viewed with something approaching suspicion -- which is why there's a tiny difference in the average starting salaries for new four-year vs. Ph.D. holders which essentially reaches a delta of zero after five years. I don't hire anyone to do visual basic code. I hire people to work on formal verification tools, superscalar processor design and mission critical systems. Nobody is "wasted"; I don't think we have anyone on technical staff who doesn't cost us six figures so "wasting" someone is an expensive luxury. People are given projects which stress them; if I ask someone what they're doing and the answer doesn't routinely include the phrases "...trying to figure out..." then it's time to give them something more challenging to do. Uh, no. I treat everyone the same: tell me what you can do, I'll ask you to do 115% of that, and we'll go from there. That's the reason we generally credit for having a low turnover rate on technical staff. Right, which is the same training that the guy with the four year degree has done, save for the fact that he's been doing it in industry on a technical team with people who have a responsibility to see to it that he's given the skills he needs to succeed -- or is assigned to something more suitable. Thanks for making my argument for me. *ROFL* I'm trying to think of the last time that I worked on a project where 65+ hour weeks didn't have to be sustained for the lifetime of the project, and for the life of me I think it was 1982. Avant! wasn't all that atypical with it's unspoken requirement that people turn in 80+ hour weeks even when it wasn't crunch time. The difference I see is that if you're late on your thesis you can add time, a luxury that isn't afforded in industry. I've got quite a few (just shy of half the technical staff), but they work for me not because they have Ph.D.s but because they've demonstrated the ability to produce results across the strangely broad range of problems that we address. However they're *no more able* to do so than their contemporaries with six year, four year or even no degrees. This may be due to a sampling error; most technical people in this organization have more than 12 years of experience and the newbies are never coddled but rather immersed into mainstream projects with assigned mentors. With apologies to Fred Brooks, there's no silver bullet for most interesting technical problems. This thread began with assertions regarding the relevance of degrees in the current job market, and someone tweaked your sensibilities with respect to holders of doctorates (for whatever reason -- as I said, I've got one and I didn't feel that it was a completely unreasonable slam). If your assertion is that a newly stamped out Ph.D. is more clueful than a new four-year the odds are good that you're correct, but it hardly makes them an ubergeek and in most industrial settings the delta between the two converges quickly. I brought this up at a staff dinner last night; of 30 people present more than half of us had Ph.D.s. *All* of us agreed that if we were faced with the choice *today* of pursuing an advanced degree or going to industry we'd forgo the degree or pursue it as a background task for purely emotional reasons. *That* is the economic reality of the industry that I live in. Cheers, Chris. -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97