Ask HN: Has my education made me unhireable?

No, your education does not.

The real reason you see many PhDs fail to get private sector jobs is that they're expecting to be compensated for that PhD. But from the perspective of a hiring manager they're really just a recent grad with a superiority complex.

If you are willing to accept that your PhD does not catapult you into being a senior developer (particularly for startups), then you shouldn't have any trouble finding a job, assuming you are in fact a good developer (unlike many PhDs).

Also, if you're in dire straits, I recommend picking up a contracting gig. It's a great way to tide you over without rushing into the first job offered.

If you'd like to work in NYC, or want to try your hand at contracting, just write to me: morgante@cafe.com.

This ^ generally you have to start at the bottom at least until you get some real world experience on your resume. Don't expect to find any benefit from your increased schooling until you've shown you can apply it to actual business problems.

>But from the perspective of a hiring manager they're really just a recent grad with a superiority complex.

I know it's fun to hate on PhDs here, but this just isn't true at all.

A PhD isn't about development true, but it still holds value. Basically it shows that you know how to problem solve, push the boundaries of what is known, work independently, and persevere until the job is done. Any hiring manager that doesn't value these traits is doing an awful job.

As for supporting evidence, I guess I could cite the fact that when I neared the completion of my degree I had a lot of recruiters calling me for very well paid jobs. All my friends in the program had similar experiences, many of whom went on to big tech companies. Hell, big tech companies advertised directly to PhD students on campus. Hardly the picture of worthlessness you are painting.

> Basically it shows that you know how to problem solve, push the boundaries of what is known, work independently, and persevere until the job is done.

Okay, sure. I don't completely discount a PhD when looking at a resume, but this also doesn't add much.

For most development jobs, a PhD is about as useful as one undergraduate summer internship in terms of demonstrating skills and adding value.

Of course, there are some jobs around theoretical & mathemetical problems where a PhD is worth a lot more. And those are probably the jobs at big tech companies which your PhD friends have been offered.

I don't think a PhD is worthless. I just don't think it makes a big difference for a developer's resume, especially because it also carries some unfortunate signaling effects (I know many PhDs who only went that route because they weren't good enough developers to get good jobs straight out of undergrad).

I would make lists of:

1) PhDs in your area, with a focus on CS and related disciplines

2) PhDs in your area, with a focus on areas that need CS grads (e.g. business, etc.)

3) Types of people you work well with (judging by your past--previous jobs, professors, family, friends). Use any typology you want--"creative women in marketing," "decisive men who enjoy technology," "ENFPs of any gender in a creative role," whatever seems to get you a usable list.

4) People in roles that you would like. For example, a developer using lots of creative leeway to build new systems.

5) People in roles that work with people in roles that you would like. For example, a developer might look for people in online marketing or a specific field you want to work in.

6) People who have advised people like you--e.g. professors, counselors at schools (yours or other schools).

Then I would contact those kinds of people (getting contact information via local Google searches, Facebook graph search, whatever works--and phone calls are ideal, email less so) and ask if you could meet with them for ~10 minutes for a brief informational interview. Basically explain your situation. See what they think. Ask them if they like their career (if applicable). Don't ask them for a job, but let them know that you are looking for work. If they offer to help you find a job, great. If they seem like they'd be a good friend, terrific.

This is one of the fastest methods of starting from scratch and finding a job that I've found. Finding a job is an amazingly analog / human feeling-driven process and sending resumes and filling out applications all day often turns out to be a waste of time, but connecting with people is like manually spinning the warped analog cogs of this messy job-finding machine in your favor.

Source: Work as a volunteer in a charitable organization, helping people find jobs / start careers.

Edit: Just wanted to say, I've been in a "need a job now" situation before several times (thankfully in the distant past), and it can be pretty depressing. Please take care of yourself and hang in there--with your background you'll find something great for sure.

This is great advice. Best way to get interviews is not to apply online; it's to go talk to people.

I was a hiring manager where I worked last. We used to get SO MANY applications for each role, that it was nearly impossible to give justice to all applicants. I'd much rather prefer someone talking to me about you, and/or handing your resume to me. Even if you're barely qualified, I'd talk to you first, because it made my searching easier. We used to hire >50% of people via referrals like that.

I currently run an interview coaching class (http://InterviewKickstart.com) and give the same advice. Those who heed it, progress faster in their search.

This is great advice, I would add one more thing:

Start actually working on things. The OP says he/she has not worked on anything outside of academia worth putting on a resume. It is not too late to start a project or working relationship that is a good conversation starter for an industry job. There are so many ways one could do this, you could go to a site like https://www.catchafire.org/ and volunteer your technical skills to a non-profit in need. You could get involved with an open source project. You could also start a project on your own. The first two are preferable to the last because the first two involve actually meeting and working with other people (you need to meet other people to get a job, obviously) but any of them would be a good first step.

The other thing I would say is you probably don't need a huge project or a flashy achievement to help yourself be viewed as someone worth giving a job offer. Your phD is going to legitimize your computing knowledge, you just have to show yourself to be interested in also being practical.

I think you have to stop believing that you're overqualified. You're only overqualified on paper in the sense that positions you're applying for require a Bachelor's, and you have more. However, that degree isn't the primary qualification for the job.

I think that it might not be a bad idea to just suck in that Ph. D. and just visualize yourself as a "fresh grad". Just one with a few more years under the belt. Find out what the undergraduates are doing to get jobs, and join them. For instance, if there is a job fair, go to it and make contacts.

One thing prospective employers may be concerned about is that if they hire you, they will get approximately the same "package" as if they hire a fresh undergrad degree, but you will expect to be paid more.

Another concern arises out of the perception that someone who has pursued a Ph. D. is an intellectual who loves researching and solving new problems, and will be bored doing day to day development: fixing someone else's bugs, or integrating some pieces together that you didn't design and whatnot.

Breathe in, breathe out.

So many people I've interviewed over the past few years who are fresh graduates are panicing over this. Trust me, there are many jobs. Some suck and some rock and you will get to experience both kinds :-)

So now that you're starting to look around "officially" consider looking around a few job sites. Where do you want to work? The SF Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Boston all have pretty solid tech hubs, Boulder/Denver, Austin, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Pittsburgh have lots of openings as well. Craigslist, hired.com, etc all have hiring managers posting for jobs.

And get clear about what you want to do. Operating systems work? Database work? Web services? Languages? Applications? Embedded systems? Robotics? High Frequency Trading? Etc.

If you don't want to be hired here are a few things you can do; insist that people call you with the Dr. honorific. Find an opportunity to explain to people how they are doing what ever it is they are doing incorrectly. Always enquire about their post high school educational experience and if they didn't graduate with a PhD ask them what lead to their failure. If they did get a PhD ask them how it was they couldn't get into your Alma Mater.

The above is a way of suggesting that your education doesn't make you who you are, you make you who you are. Your passions, your values, and your work ethic. Employers hire people not degrees. You'll be fine.

Places like Lockheed Martin pay a premium to have PhDs run their research programs, (credentials matter to the customers) and if you know how to program you will have an enormous advantage over the other PIs who are mostly not programmers. You'll make a decent wage and work on interesting stuff.

This is definitely true at NASA. A PhD is tremendously helpful there. You will almost certainly be making a higher starting wage than someone with just a BS or MS, and you have many opportunities for advancement as a PI down the road. They are often looking for people with programming skills.

Build things, open-source them on GitHub, and get a job doing something similar to what you know how to build.

Or contribute to a medium size existing project if thinking of what to make is a problem. Medium size will mean you have the ability to make substantial contributions.

Perhaps you should look outside of pure-software firms. Aerospace, biotech, finance, geoengineering, etc all require software engineers with a strong academic and/or theoretical background. I work at such a place that would not demerit you for having a PhD, and perhaps even make your chances better.

Even a lot of firms that rely mainly on software need people with strong theoretical background. For example, Google X, Netflix, Amazon, and any shop doing robotics.

If you think you don't have a shot based on your background, you are looking in the wrong places, narrowing your scope too much, not networking at all, or a combination of the three.

Github, contribute to projects or find something interesting and launch a project. De-emphasis the education if you feel it's a disadvantage, stick it near the bottom of your CV, if you dont want to look like a post-academia liability (as you put it) then center your CV around experience so you fit the experience hire category rather than intern. You are not fucked..

Think about the market you're interested in and shape your brand to fit that market. Part of that: use the right keywords. The jobs will come to you. If you don't tell people what you want to do, how will they know? If you want to work in eCommerce, you need to have "eCommerce" on all of your profiles. Pick the job title you want and start using it everywhere. I recommend you dive into LinkedIn, it's easy to find work on there without emailing or calling anyone. All you have to do is build your network and work on your "Summary" section. Here's a basic LinkedIn roadmap (work in progress) http://linkedexpertsalliance.com/topic/how-to-find-fresh-new... If you use my method, let me know how it worked for you.

If it's the name of your school that is the problem, which is possible considering that the experience of everyone I know with a CS PhD is very different, then you can always fix this by taking on a postdoc at a school with a better reputation.

Postdocs are not a great use of time generally, but definitely better than sitting unemployed and are actually quite good at helping you network and/or diversify your skill set.

That said, never count on reputation, in the end the individual is what matters. Fancy schools can have poor graduates and poor schools can have amazing graduates. You just need to convince people you are not the average at your school. Open source contributions or projects help, as do practical demos. Why not take your research work and apply it to a real problem? Throw up a little demo on a website if possible and do a bit of blogging. Definitely won't hurt.

I do know of some companies that will refuse to hire anyone with a PhD (My dad with 20+ years of work experience actually ran into that; the recruiter moved his education to a second page, so they didn't know he had a PhD until he mentioned his dissertation, and the interview was instantly over with little more than "We don't hire PhDs, goodbye."

On the other hand, I've worked in software with someone who had a PhD in Biomedical engineering (so not even CS!), and he got his first job via a referral; if anyone who knows you can code (Undergrad classmate? Open source collaborator?) works somewhere that's hiring, that would be a great way to get your foot in the door.

We may have just found someone, but do you want to send me your resume? rob@agfunder.com

What is your portfolio like? What are you doing to improve it?

There are many reasons companies will reject candidates. Don't latch onto one thing too soon. Maybe it's just your résumé wording.

Amazon hires PhDs for machine learning research, and it seems like you could also get hired as a straight SDE as well. Lmk if you can't find the public job boards.

What kind of positions are you trying to get into? Many big companies have research divisions that heavily recruit from Ph.Ds (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc).

If on the other hand you're gunning for a standard developer position, you're definitely going to have a hard time because of who you're competing against as well as the stereotype of Ph.d's like you mentioned.

Start-ups receive only 1-10 resumes per day, so they're much more likely to bring in someone they don't know for an interview.

Larger companies receive thousands of resumes per day, therefore a personal reference is essential to getting in the door.

Avoid using a one-size-fits-all resume. For each start-up applying to, write a custom resume tailored to their needs.

Get a job. But first realize degrees don't matter. Technology companies tend to value real-world experience a hell of a lot more than diplomas. I am speaking as a software engineer without any degree. you aren't fucked but you need to get a job. Any job experience at all will differentiate you from all the other PhDs out there.

Try applying to more research oriented companies. You could also always take a post-doc or something while you are searching.

Coding interviews are specifically designed to tell whether people write clean code. If you can get to that stage, you'll probably be fine.

Just the fact that you're thinking about these kind of issues tells me you're heading in the right direction. Drop me a line at samb@zenefits.com and I'll get you a phone screen here.

I am a mechanical engineer, so the rules might be slightly different, but I have been told:

If you want a job in industry you are wasting your time getting a PhD, and if you want a government or academic job then you are wasting your time doing anything else.

You just need to find someone that values your degree, and startups might not be the right place.

"I wasn't aware then that PhD meant 'professor in training'..."

It doesn't necessarily mean that. Lots of people with PhDs in CS go to work outside of academia. (Maybe most of them these days, since tenure-track jobs in academia have been getting increasingly difficult to find.)

If you're thinking of finance as an avenue:

Try middle office in larger banks / investment managers, as that is where in-roads are typically made: Risk management, support applications, etc. A foot in the door for front office, or just stay in middle office.

Or small hedge funds can work.

Could you take your research and create a business based upon it? Might be something to look at if you are going to be graduated and without work at first. I wouldn't put it as "Plan A", but it could be a good "Plan C" or "Plan D"

There's this guy Sergey Brin who got a PhD too, he ended up alright. Here's his resume as a student. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html

not sure that your comment helps the OP, but that is an amazing resume. Shows the kind of intellect Sergey has.

That's completely irrelevant to the OP's current dilemma, unless if you're suggesting that he start his own company. And Sergey Brin actually suspended his PhD studies to work on Google instead, once they realized the potential.

Check out VersatilePhD (http://www.versatilephd.com). It's been a great help to me (ABD in Comparative Literature).

I'm a recent graduate with a BS in Math, my 'early years' background is similar to yours... if you can't get a job, I don't know why I bother to keep applying.

Best of luck mate.

I don't think it's that bad. It sounds like you could counter that perception of yourself by simply giving future employers a link to your Github profile.

If you don't have one, make one!

Hey man,

Thanks for posting here...I can't speak for big companies but I wouldn't be so reluctant to apply to a startup.

First of all, I'd say that most startups growing quickly will judge engineering candidates on merit, not connections. If you're a startup growing aggressively, hiring great people is so important that you end up using your personal networks not to filter candidates but rather to find more candidates than you'd otherwise get through people who apply cold. For our team, if we saw two brilliant engineers, a PhD who applied cold, and another wonderful fellow with a connection to our team, we'd hire both.

I'm sure there are some stereotypes about PhDs, but I'd be surprised to find a startup that held it against you. One piece is advice...I think showing humility is important. I've seen some PhDs who want to join our team and dive right in (that's great!) while others are only interested in leading a research team or something fancy like that even though they have no work experience (that's not great). I'll always give someone the benefit of the doubt so I won't assume that any PhD I meet is too big for his/her britches, but as a PhD applicant I think it's important to understand that anyone leading hiring has probably seen plenty of PhDs who don't come to the table with the humility you need for a startup job.

Last thought -- the one challenge in applying to startups is to make sure they don't accidentally reject you, e.g. we're a relatively small team and we get thousands of applications a year, and we try our darndest to read every one and review every code challenge and take everyone seriously. That said, I'm sure we make mistakes every now and then, and we overlook someone who's awesome. As an applicant, one way you can avoid that is to make yourself stand out. Was your PhD research really fascinating? Have you built something cool? etc. For example, people sometimes email me as the CEO instead of applying through our web site. It happens often enough that in most cases I'll introduce them to the head of recruiting on our team; I can't get involved personally every time or it's all I'd do every day. But if someone really stands out when they email me -- and in a substantive way -- I'll pay attention.

Sorry man, I know the job search is hard, especially coming out of a PhD program, but the good news is that you're in a highly competitive job market for engineers and most companies are hiring on merit.

PS if you're looking in Boston, feel free to email me afeuer@panoramaed.com (Panorama YC S13)

You're not screwed. If you're within commuting distance from San Francisco shoot me an email: artem@buildzoom.com. We are hiring smart engineers with potential.

Resigned a few days ago for the same reasons. I have been working no less than a senior for months, and each month my company made me remember that I am a junior.

The distinction between senior and junior developers isn't in how much they work, but in what results come from the work they do.

If anything, I expect junior developers to work a bit more than senior developers to accelerate their learning.

Well, I am not counting the time/energy I spent for the job, but I am comparing the outcome of my work. I agree that I sometimes work a little bit more (by means of time) than a senior engineer, but as the outcome of my work matches the senior, then I want my salary to match or come close to seniors. Definition of senior here is "someone who works for 2 years in development." Nobody cares if you suck or excel in your job during the 2 years.

If you are interested in a job that would expose you to a wide range of disciplines inside and outside of CS, please send us your resume at jobs@formlabs.com

Throwing together a sample project would help you with your search.

I know you worked incredibly hard in academia but people love to see tangible things.

Whats your phd in OP? Depending on which subfield of CS you are, you could be highly marketable. Is it computer vision?

Speaking as a mostly recovered ex-PhD, the factors which affect hireablility are largely orthogonal to your educational credentials, particularly if you are attempting to get hired for a job which is not gated against said credentials (i.e. most jobs in industry, regardless of what the HR documentation claims).

Also, most things that people will tell you re: build portfolio, contribute to open source, etc. — it's largely a waste of your time, at least with regard to getting a paycheck with large numbers in your hands as expeditiously as possible. Please, contribute to open source, I need that stuff. But don't do it because you think you have to in order to land job interviews.

If your skill and discipline as a "get stuff done every day" developer is roughly no better than your average junior web developer, that's approximately a $90k/yr position for which the market has deep unmet demand. The set of people who are hiring decently competent developers is approximately "everyone with an existing software development team."

A much better approach is:

* Make a list of companies you would be interested in working for

* Figure out who at these companies is currently managing a dev team

* Contact those people, convince them you can write compiling code

* Discuss doing work for them in exchange for large amounts of currency

Beyond that, understand that you're going to have a learning curve to get your "getting stuff done every day" and domain-specific development skills up to spec. Right now, you're probably about as productive as a junior developer with six months of industry experience. This sucks, but you're already aware of it. The typical grad student is shit about e.g. coding as part of a team, using commit-driven development, issue tracking, that sort of routine process things that keep work happening regularly - even if they have a great grasp of their chosen languages(s) and tool(s), which many do not.

If you play your cards right, the learning curve from there to "competent if inexperienced senior developer" is about 6 to 18 months for a typical engineering grad student who has some experience mentoring undergrads and helping them through issues like "this wouldn't have happened if you'd just use version control" and "would you please write comments that tell me what the heck you're trying to do with this block of code."

At worst, the outlook is about the same as a run-of-the-mill junior developer, who is still likely taking home an embarrassingly large paycheck while they improve their skills.

Your safety net is "CRUD monkey." That already pays well enough to make the median dual-income American family rather jealous. From there, what do you want your career to be? Application development? Graphics? Data science? Database engineering? Pick something, find teams that are working on that, talk to them about the work they're doing. Bonus points if you already have some understanding about their subject area based on reading you did as a grad student, or projects you worked on, but they likely already hire people with less domain experience than that.

Send me your resume adam@getbellhops.com

>>How can I prove I'm not just yet another post-academia liability if no one will look past my resume?

Apply to whom ever sponsored your research. Indeed, you are probably overqualified to write CSS for a living.

This. Networking is your best ally in the job hunt.

Just don't mention your PhD in your resume.

On the one hand, if one holds a MSc, it's easy to just omit the PhD in the resume. On the other hand, if one doesn't, then just listing a BSc might not be a good idea.

Reason #763 why it's a good idea to make sure you do whatever paperwork's required for a Master's in Passing along the way to your PhD, if it's an option in your program. Sadly, it's not something that happens by default at all (maybe even most?) institutions... even if you intend for your terminal degree to be a PhD, the MSc is nice to have around in case something goes wrong.

You'll still have a gap in your resume, but the ~two-year gap is likely to look better on paper than a four-year (or more) gap between Bachelor's and now.

That might work if he had many years of work experience. But since he has no work experience, potential employers would immediately wonder what he was doing in the years since he graduated. And his PhD work is the only thing he can point to to show that he's worked somewhere as a developer. Besides, to the right employer - one who is trying to solve a novel problem - someone who has experience working on a research project could be a valuable asset.

If the OP had any official duties or responsibilities while enrolled in his program, then he can always list his PhD studies as a four year "teaching and research assistant" position or whatever.