Ask HN: Any PhDs from non-CS fields switch into Development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any PhDs from non-CS fields switch into Development?

My sister has her PhD in a Bio-health field, and is currently in the SF area looking for a job with little luck. She wonders if a "career change" is in order and doesn't know if having an unrelated PhD would complicate things when trying to break into the CS world.

So has any HNer successfully switched from a unrelated higher education degree and managed a good CS career?

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Depends how "unrelated". I have friends with non-CS PhDs who work as programmers, but they were all doing largely computational science.

Ultimately if someone has the right skills, they can get a programming job. If they don't have the right skills but are smart enough, they can acquire the skills needed to get a job in a reasonable amount of time (months, not years). But employers won't just assume that someone with a completely unrelated PhD will be able to pick up programming on the fly.

It's pretty unrelated - Virology, but she's pretty sharp and was always mathmatically inclined. More so than me, and I've been pretty successful in the programming 'field' (though different versions of "success" are stressed).

Of the older generation, I think Dijkstra had a Physics Ph.D., and I know that the developer and writer P.J. Plauger did.

Years ago I heard of a philosophy instructor who didn't get tenure and so switched to programming, making a good deal more money. All I remember of this was that his specialty was Wittgenstein.

Honestly even if she did little to no programming for her PhD, that just means there is far less of a "PhD stink" than if she had. Plenty of people switch from non-CS-related degrees, with B.A.'s in things like art history, to a software development career. All that matters is if they can code.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, she's got no experience, but I did suggest a code camp, and there are a whole lot of them in the SF area, so she's got that advantage. Not to mention unemployed, so I suggested just learning on her own too, and building some portfolio level items to get her in the door.

I have a physics PhD; I think I was the only one in my class who did a postdoc instead of going to Goldman Sachs.

Haha, I think she'd be happy with something in the more median range, but her PhD is less math, more biology (Virology).

I've know someone with a Physics PhD who is working at Microsoft in development.

Nice. I actually sent her a couple job postings for 23andme (not Microsoft, but somewhat related to Google). Her PhD was in Virology. Not quite as much as a fit to CS as Physics though.

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