Comment by kurtosis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kurtosis | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is really depressing to contemplate. Has anyone here been through the experience where you went to grad school for curiosity and found that it made you unemployable? I really fear this outcome. I went to graduate school because I looked up at the end of my undergrad degree and realized that my knowledge of Physics was very shallow. I was pretty obvious just from the numbers I was extremely unlikely to get any kind of academic employment, but I decided that it didn't matter because I was sure I could talk to someone and convince them that I was a "practical" person. In another year I'm going to look seriously for a job and this story scares me. Is it really this hard to find a job solving hard practical problems with computers? Would someone seriously say that it's "too theoretical" to have experience building scientific instruments and software to control them in a lab, software that by construction has a real user? It really worries me that someone with a PhD in soft eng from CMU had such a hard time. This doesn't leave me much hope of crossing fields.

No. My experience in a PhD program made me more employable. Last year, when looking for a job, I got interest and offers from industry positions as a direct result of the skills I learned while pursuing a PhD (in Computer Science). As kurtosis here mentions, you often learn real practical skills while doing research. I interviewed for developer positions, and no one suggested that I wasn't practical. We talked about development I'd done.

The article's use of the "plain ol' developer position" phrase suggests that this person had a different problem. God forbid they said that in an interview... They were apparently not interviewing for jobs they actually wanted.

If you actually want the job, you'll be interested in it, you'll explain why you're a good fit, and you probably won't describe it as a "plain ol'" anything, even in jest, even to yourself. Otherwise, why waste the time?

I think the person is more wildly confused than anything else. I don't know of any PhD students having trouble getting jobs. Somehow this person has gotten the impression that what you do with a PhD is go out and get an entry level job prorgramming RoR or something. That is not the case.

I agree that people can enter and follow the programming career path easily without a PhD. Completing a PhD equips you to follow your dream of science, of being a patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night, but it doesn't exactly help you make money. Like studying classical music for ten years and then complaining you can't get a job: dude, I hate to upset you, but a "job" wasn't the point at all.

One thing I realized was that the PhD isn't what makes you the patent clerk by day and brilliant theorist by night. It is the brilliant theorist that makes you the PhD and the patent clerk by day.

This is true, at least in Einstein's case. Or, s/patent clerk/surfer/g, s/Einstein/Garrett Lisi/g But the romanticism has gone out of proportion.

Actually, I don't understand this either. The PhD is what makes you a patent clerk by day? Does anyone actually know Einstein's real history and not the vague stuff written on the backs cereal cartons? This sounds like the same stuff people say when they erroneously talk about Einstein as having not been good at mathematics. As for all this stuff about how PhDs don't make any money and how no one cares about their work boo hoo wah wah .. There are thousands of working PhDs that would disagree with you all and think you all out of your minds!

I don't really understand this. Einstein was a patent clerk before getting a PhD. Honestly, if you think PhDs don't make any money, frankly I don't think you know what you're talking about. Perhaps this is the case in the arts and humanities but in science, particularly computer science, this isn't the case at all. I always here people say this and usually they recommend people go get stuck in some 60,000 a year job, because supposedly that's more than any PhD will make ... lol. It's a naive view that CS PhDs don't or unlikely to make much money. Sure, most PhDs aren't millionairies several times over but neither are code monkeys. I'm just trying to be honest about it.

if you think PhDs don't make any money

I don't. PhD correlates with smartness, and smartness correlates with wages. Please take care not to assume causation.

But should you get a PhD just to make money without a love for research? Each year of industry experience at a young age will be more valuable to you than a year of study. Yes, you can get stuck. You can also get unstuck and learn ten different languages under ten different employers, as I did.

I'm not assuming any such thing about "causation." This is an empirical issue for which you seem to have been very much misinformed.

My general experience is the opposite re: crossing fields - I run across many people doing software dev with a MS or PhD in something else. Just this past week I interviewed at a research institute where one of the primary developers had a PhD in biology. He didn't give me the impression that doing only software dev was his first choice, but clearly he was working.

I would guess from your experience "building scientific instruments and software to control them" you would be able to find a job doing dev. If you can swing it while you're still a student, I would highly, highly recommend you do some internships with companies writing software, even if it is doing the same type of code you currently do. If you can't do that, pick up a minor in CS while doing your physics grad work.

Not terribly. For the same reason we make fun of liberal arts majors -- not thinking of what sort of job they get when they get out -- we have to consider (ack! gasp!) our post-graduate careers.

FWIW, it sounds like the author here was really applying for the wrong job.

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