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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

The counter is that only a small minority of people who graduate with a PhD get to do research in their fields after graduating. It's a disservice to them if they don't gain skills beyond research.

It's why many PhDs can't get jobs in teams like mine - they don't have the skills of people with lesser degrees, and while we're not against training new candidates, we don't want to pay them large sums of money when the guy who just had a BS degree came in with all these skills.

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What skills are you talking about? Git commit and unit testing? Not saying they’re insignificant skills but a competent PhD should be able to learn them quite fast (in a month) in a competent environment. I and many others did. The issue is that there are a large number of phds who are actually much dimmer than your average programmer, and you’re not differentiating them in the interviews.

Any programmer can learn to write a unit test. Not all can learn to design code to be easily testable. If you can't differentiate before hiring, because they don't even know how to write tests, then you're taking a big risk hiring them.

> Not saying they’re insignificant skills but a competent PhD should be able to learn them quite fast (in a month) in a competent environment. I and many others did.

They can also learn them quite fast before the interview/job, and it's a concern that they don't, when almost all other applicants do.

Agreed; to be clear I and others learned it before our interviews. But it didn’t take long.

True. I’m hiring lots of data scientists and have become somewhat disappointed with the phd profiles. It happens too often that they lack the broader skills to be successful, vs people who did do “non-core” activities and are now more well rounded.

This is a systemic problem of universities having become money-making machines, hence opening as many PhD positions as they can with as few tenure-track positions as possible. Changing PhDs to become vocational schools is like putting a band-aid on a skull fracture.

I think you've lost the plot. The author is talking about hiring people who already know how to do these things!

This isn't about skills development. It's about using people who already have these skills as engineering support labor for the research group while paying then 1/2 to 1/5th of what they'd make in industry doing equivalent work (that, again, they already know how to do!)

Author here---my point is not to exploit cheap labour, but rather to consider more than `$num_papers` when evaluating a CV. Getting a student that can, for instance, foster a culture of 'clean code' can benefit a lab as well. My point is that these people are typically not recognised or rewarded---and that needs to change.

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