Are these academic types great engineers? Do you find that the academics have a major edge in domain knowledge over self taught programmer?
Personally I don't mind the candidate's background so far as they can do the job (how the interview is a sucky way to determine this is another topic of conversation).
The thing lacking is a hacker's credibility as an ML researcher, which i think is ironically preposterous given the self-teaching of complex domains with engineered proof.
I don't see what an PhD has on the class of self taught hackers is what I'm trying to say. Just kidding, I know the answer is that they are trained in a certain institutional mentality. Give me my downvotes.
This is where an ML engineer comes into play, they’re not so academic but way better at writing production code