Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

The problem, essentially, boils down to the fact that the author had a Ph.D. but was a junior at whatever the companies he was applying for needed. But didn't want to get a junior level position.

This is where "And (2) my Ph.D. background, while impressive, just didn’t fit the profile of a data scientist (whose background is usually in machine learning or statistics), a product manager (Ph.D.’s couldn’t even apply for Google’s Associate Product Manager Program until recently), or a programmer (my experience writing code at a university, even on a product with 47,000 unique downloads, didn’t count as coding “experience”)."

I don't know about the other profiles, but programmers with only academia experience rarely code better than complete juniors. I've recently helped a team of Stanford grads get to grips with coding in an industry environment and the biggest surprise seemed to be that just because it works it doesn't mean it's done. You have to make it supportable, make it workable-on by others etc. etc.

Heck, I'm pretty terrified of the code written by CS professors.

One time I got a C code from one of the leading lights in machine learning, compiled it, ran it, and it segfaulted right away.

I started up the debugger, set a breakpoint in main() and it didn't even get that far.

I looked at the code and saw that he was statically allocating a 4GB array that he never used. I guess this didn't cause a problem on the 64 bit machine he was using, but it caused the code to blow up on 32 bit machines. I removed the array and it worked OK.

I was lucky to be programming in Java while it was still in beta when I was working on my PhD. One thing I noticed was that even the more computer savvy physics professors didn't get object orientation or any of the architectural concepts around it at all, so I was often called a "bad programmer" and told I should be more like somebody who cut his teeth on FORTRAN.

A "data scientist" or a "programmer" are hardly senior level positions.

In my experience as a PhD with (currently) almost 4 yrs postdoc experience, I rarely get an interview when I apply for an industry position. I think there is a good element of truth in what the original author is saying about a gap. As PhD students and postdocs we do a lot of things. We have to write code, we have to manage students, teach, publish, apply for grants, manage research groups or entire projects, handle scientific and financial reporting, etc. The problem is that our skills don't exactly match company requirements that normally have different people for most of these tasks. To make things worse, people tend to believe that we will be arrogant pricks who will demand really high salaries even though we are clueless about how things work outside academia. Just look at some of the comments here.

For an entry level programming position a recent CS BSc appears much more desirable and cheaper than any PhD. I doubt that we even get much of a chance to show how good (or bad) we are. For higher level positions a PhD rarely has the "right" experience. What we are left with is usually something that fits well with our research. This is what the author found and as far as I know he is not in the minority.

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