Getting a good job

"Eric J. Korpela" wrote: If you amend that to "...learned more about a very specific topic in that extra 4+ years..." then I'd agree. The principle problem with Ph.D.s is that their knowledge base tends to be as narrow as any other new grads; the only distinction being that they have significantly more depth in one very specific area. Worse, during the past four years that they've been focused on that area they've typically been in the "simplifying assumptions" world that's so prevalent in academia; the difficulty being that more often than not they simplify the problem into oblivion and consequently have little useful to offer when it comes to delivering product. I've had more than one occasion where such people were literally reduced to tears in design meetings as a consequence of being crucified by some staff engineer. "...drop in the lap of a typical PhD who is familiar with the problem area..." Certainly anytime someone already has the proper frame of reference it takes less time for them to spin up; this was useful to me once when I needed formal correctness proofs of optimizations being performed by a code generator for a parallel processor. I went to Rice, got myself someone whose Ph.D. was in that very field and had them generate the (dis)proofs. When they were done we tried to find other things for them to do, but they were only marginally more effective than our new crop of four-year grads. The person in question is now making use of their Ph.D. by teaching undergraduate CS courses. I don't see any evidence that the skill set is particularly different; I haven't noticed that holding a Ph.D. makes one any more adept at solving problems or even particularly good at operating the coffee maker. All the Ph.D. represents is an additional four years of training in an environment that is skewed from the one found in industry; the only place where this would be an advantage is if they were to remain in that academic environment -- which many (eventually) do. Of course, my bias is actually broader than this. Given the choice between someone with four years of experience and someone with no experience and an advanced degree I'll generally pick the guy with real world experience. Given the choice between two people with new four year degrees, one with a 4.0, the other with a 2.9 because they were working in the field in order to put themselves through school I'll generally take the guy with the 2.9. It's all about what you can do and how well it fits with my needs. Everything else is meaningless. -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97