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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

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ryanSrich

Lol wut? This can't be serious. Can you please name this company so everyone can avoid them?

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Snapchat does this when they try to acquire companies.

Hilarious. We've reached a place where a doctorate in CS is an insufficient qualification to delete a fucking file.

IMO the pendulum swings both ways. I'd bet money many a PHD could not delete a file properly.

From what I've seen, people with PhDs in CS are less competent as devs than devs without PhDs.

That doesn't make sense at all. I do not see why a PhD would disproportionally filter out people with talent for coding, so that the graduates even after years of industry experience afterwards would still be unable to be great at coding.

I'm speaking anecdotally, and there are many ways my sample may be biased. (Also, maybe bad PhD devs make sure everyone knows they have PhDs, while competent devs never mention it?).

OTOH, there could be something in culture and personality that pushes lesser devs into getting PhDs.

No, but not having a PhD filters out people without a talent for coding. Same with not having a college degree at all - it's not that going to college makes you worse at coding, but that getting a coding job without a college degree requires you to be better at coding.

What a PhD in CS teaches you is how to do research in CS. This skill may or may not be valuable for a specific company and may or may not intersect with raw dev chops. Production Dev is a distinct skill from CS research.

As a dev who has both interviewed and worked with several dozen PhDs and ABDs, the intersection of skills required to both be a great developer and complete (or nearly complete) a PhD are nearly zero.

the assumption here is that people can only learn at adequately fast rates before earning their phd? aka, isnt the expectation that if you can earn a phd in at least a highly related industry you should be able to pick up just about anything. Are they going to know how to wrangle a huge dev ops stack into submission, or pump data through some realtime frame work to maximize throughput or setup paxos properly from day 0, fine. but neither does any other entry level engineer and these guys can either learn it or be placed on a different team within the company that does deeper research that would make use of their phd...

Horses for courses. If you to do R&D, go with PhDs, if you want D&D, go with devs.

> if you want D&D, go with devs.

I'll go with a mage, thief, and warrior instead ;)

This is such a toxic attitude.

The industry complains about being unable to find enough programming talent, while dismissing entire swathes of highly trained, highly educated people for investing in themselves.

I have heard that Facebook also has a rigorous screening process for acquihires too, and people get sent away althought with a generous severance package.

I'll just say it starts with a "P" and ends in "interest"

Google does this too. There is exceptions but they are rare.

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