Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

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> I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life

I can't tell you how many PhD's I know the resemble your remarks. Quite a few of them (most?) are not doing anything related to their field of study. For example, one with a PhD in Physics owns a small vocational school teaching nursing and some IT courses.

The following is going to sound horrible. Over the years, having worked with thousands of people over a career spanning about five decades and across a range of disciplines, I developed this strong belief that if you need to get things done you should not hire PhD's.

In fact, speaking of technology, some of the most creative and talented people I have worked with were university dropouts who, for the most part, got tired of the slow pace and wasted efforts (i.e., having a year of general education coursework for an EE or CS degree) and went off on their own. I am talking about people who had a direct hand in delivering millions of dollars of revenue for the companies who employed them and doing so at breakneck speed. The going joke at one place where I used to work was something like: If you need it done right and in 6 to 12 months, get a college dropout with enough schooling to be able to do the job. If you have four years and don't are about making a prouct, hire a PhD.

I know, harsh. I did warn it would be.

That said, I have met many brilliant PhD's. I just don't know how the skills, capabilities, creativity and productivity metrics distribute in that population. No clue at all.

You missed the point of hiring PhDs. You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.

You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.

The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.

> You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.

Not necessarily true. I have been there many times. We did not need PhD's to solve the problems.

One thing people might fail to understand is that there are professionals who not only invest the proverbial 10,000 hours to become experts in a field but go way beyond that and live and breathe the stuff for decades.

I don't want to sound like I am hating on PhD's. I am not. Just saying that they might just lack the marketing value some assign to the degree, that's all. You don't need N years of torture at a university to become an expert on something at the bleeding edge. In fact, in some cases this is almost impossible because the resources and "rules of engagement" in a university research context are very different from that of a business environment where your competitors are trying to eat your lunch every day and you have to perform or die.

You are absolutely correct in saying that certain industries favor having PhD's on the roster.

Here's what's interesting about that. We have done a range of aerospace projects for DARPA-related work. What happens more often than not is that the PhD's go get the funding and then discover they can't build it. That's when they shovel money our way to actually make it happen. I don't have a single PhD on staff. We get shit done. No matter how complex. From industrial products to sending hardware to the Space Station and (hopefully soon) the moon, 'been there, done that.

If the problem you are trying to solve doesn’t require niche scientific knowledge, you don’t need PhDs. That sounds like common sense?

This discussion reminds me of a book called Range. The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation, rather it’s a their broad sampling across unrelated domains and their ability to essentially cross pollinate from their experiences that is their key to coming up with novel ideas. The kinds of people who rapidly sample and acquire range I’d say are also likely to be college dropouts.

I mean, this is the premise of interdisciplinary practices at pretty much every university. Interdisciplinary research is one of the big buzzwords you hear in grants and interviews. Interdisciplinary PhD programs are big for this reason.

> The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation

This makes sense to me from a range of perspectives. A simple example of this --too simple, yes-- is when I hired an EE out of Intel. I was looking for someone to take on a range of responsibilities. He claimed he could do what I needed. After hiring him I started to realize he had been "creative" in the profile he painted for me. It turns out he had only worked on power supplies at Intel. And by that I don't mean full product cycle. He designed them. On paper. Never even ordered a single part. Never laid out a PCB, etc. It was bad. I ended-up having to be "Professor Martin" and teaching him a bunch of stuff. Not a good outcome. Great guy, just didn't work out in the end.

In sharp contrast to this, I worked with people in the motion picture industry who were nothing less than amazing. One guy had a degree in music, he had studied to be an opera singer. He self-taught software and hardware development, mechanics and all kinds of other things. He ended-up building and owning on of the most well-known visual and special effects companies in Hollywood. The people he hired had similar eclectic backgrounds.

It was very interesting and revealing. This experience definitely opened my eyes and mind and, honestly, made me less of an elitist dick when hiring people. I could not care less what degrees someone brings through the door. I have learned this has no relationship whatsoever with creativity and raw job performance. What you are looking for is the ability to learn and what they have done in the last n years. That's it. A non-asshole who is driven to learn difficult things can run circles around almost any degree. Frankly, part of it might be that they have to in order to survive.

Of course, there are regulated industries where you have to hire degrees due to liability exposure. Medical is an simple example of this. Self driving cars might be another. If you sued and the lawyers discover critical staff doesn't have university degrees it could be a royal mess (or, at the very least, cost a ton more money to defend technical decisions).

In other words, there's an industry-dependent bias that might favor one or the other.

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