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Comment by f6v | Hacker News Reader

> You have a PhD in Computer Science, one of the highest academic accomplishments in one of the hottest fields for the last 30-40 years. I want you to know how far ahead you are of people like me who just taught themselves to code and glue web apps together for 6 figures.

Don’t want to be a buzzkill but OP can as well be a mediocre engineer, even with a CS PhD. It’s important to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses.

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Unfortunately, a CS PhD doesn't even guarantee mediocrity.

It can be even worse than that: be amazing at the theory, be an amazing engineer, but being unable to make something that can be interpreted by others makes you an unacceptable risk to any company (except your own).

I think just about any engineer can accomplish that feat, PhD or not.

It does take some serious skill to construct something like FISR that works and is efficient, but not easily understood.

Writing crappy code is indeed are more widely available skill ;-)

OP could be a lot of things, however, I'm going to go with OP being "likely employable in the future" due to having a PhD and being currently employed with a near-Google salary. Don't be an asshole.

So, in earnest, I don't see what the parent comment said that deserves them to be called an asshole. I actually see you calling them an asshole as much more rude than anything they said.

I figure there's some social implication that I'm missing. Would you mind breaking down the thought process for your reply?

Not GP, but the "as well" in that comment could be seen to imply that GP is a mediocre engineer, and OP is as well.

That sentence is grammatically incorrect. But even if meaning this, calling him an a-hole is a bit harsh, especially for HN.

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