I thought this is an extremely inaccurate portrayal of CS PhDs who want to get into good startups. Pretty much all the PhDs I know can hack prodigious amounts of code and are not totally incompetent socially. Where they lack are mature sw dev skills (unit test, fancy design patterns, comments in their code, variable names). This is not because they are lazy or unawares. Most systems grad student projects have a specific structure that makes this a reasonable choice. Many students don't work with teams of devs during their PhD education. So please .. do not think most PhDs can't code.