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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

This feeds off a misconception people have of the idea of a PhD. A PhD is not something you get by studying more, taking a few years more in advanced courses.

It is something you get by specializing on a topic so much that you are pretty much THE expert on that specific topic. (The inside joke is that at the end of your PhD you must know everything about nothing)

This fundamentally makes the usual job search strategy of casting a wide net completely useless. A PhD is typically a worse employee than a normal malleable undergrad you can train unless you really need an expert on the topic the person has a PhD on.

It’s not uncommon for top tier Phds to land good jobs regardless of, but that’s more because of willingness to do different things, give up on solving problems you have invested half a decade into, and the general availability of researchy jobs.

The last one is the least important.

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While this is somewhat true, people also overstate how narrow a Phd student’s general understanding of the field really become as they specialize. For pretty much any serious field, specialization is inescapable without spending decades minimally studying the field via many branches, but a Phd isn’t just preparing you to have a specialized understanding of a specific branch within the field, because very often contributing something mostly new and worthy to that branch requires a mix of depth and breadth, the proportions of which depend on the exact field, branch and specialized topic. Most Phd curriculums I’ve seen still require students to take several advanced courses outside of their main topic area and take exams in multiple areas within the field. Somebody working in only one area would need to have at least graduate level understanding of multiple branches to get through these. I have also seen Phd students who are not broadly interested or comfortable in certain core branches of their field so there are all types and different requirements for different programs.

The graduate level understanding of multiple branches can be pretty hollowed out.

In practice you read the relevant papers, and have mentors and collaborators explain the insights useful for a particular purpose until you get the zeitgeist but not an in depth understanding of a neighboring field.

I wasn’t talking about altogether different fields, perhaps you meant branches of the same field in your last part?

Depends on how you want to define fields.

Fields that seem really close to the layman are surprisingly difficult to have any knowledge transfer.

For example Programming Languages and Compilers.

This is a very simplistic view of a PhD and basically a prejudice.

During conducting a PhD, you learn a lot about organizing yourself, about how to work together with others in a professional context, about teaching and guiding others, about presenting you and your results orally and in a written way, about using certain tools (whatever applies in your field) and so on.

Some people like to view it the way that a PhD makes you a expert in one field and rendering yourself useless for any other task. But this is in general far from reality. As a PhD (at least where I live in Germany and in the field of engineering) you are indeed expected to have a broad view such that you are able to know where you are located with your PhD topic and such that you are indeed not a narrow expert.

I know that many American lectures are given by "TAs" that are PhD students, but do most American PhD students (or in Germany in your case) teach and guide others? That is certainly not the case for my European country: even if one wanted to teach as a PhD student for the experience on one's CV, the answer is usually that the department's budget wouldn't allow creating another teaching position for you.

Here, you may give seminars. These are often about solving some tasks (e.g., "compute the Fourier transform of a triangle"). Sometimes it is just consultation where students can ask stuff about the lecture. You may als be asked to conduct lab experiments with students. Sometimes your only teaching consists of supervising student research projects, Bachelor's theses or Master's theses.

The lectures are usually given by the professor (head of the research group). Sometimes a PhD gives a lecture when the professor is away. But yes, it depends on your employment contract. If your contract involves a lot of teaching you might even give a whole lecture - though this is rarely the case for employees without PhD.

Yes, so this could be the case for countries where PhDs are employees of the university. However, in other countries PhDs might be entirely externally funded and not department staff, so they would not do any teaching or guiding during the PhD (or possibly even during their postdocs).

What you are describing is a side effect of pursuing a PhD, not the main goal.

You can achieve the same side effects, often better, by pairing a smart undergrad with a good mentor.

Deep expertise is not about the soft skills here.

There are a lot of PhDs in my company and basically none of them was hired because of the specific topic* of research they were pursuing during their thesis. Yet having the PhD was a huge plus during hiring and in most cases even an (informal) requirement.

I think it happens quite rarely that a company is looking for a PhD based on the specifc topic of their thesis. If that ever happens, you can consider yourself lucky though, because they will probably pay you a fortnue if they really think that they couldn't put any other PhDs on that topic.

*that is not to say field of research like "Machine Learning", but rather something like "loss functions for graph neural networks".

In the early to mid-1970s we hired a number of Physics and Chemistry PhDs for systems engineering positions. We chose candidates primarily on their experience with designing and operating laboratory experiments and instrumentation. This included discussions about design principles, difficulties and roadblocks, errors and repeatability, automation considerations, and so forth to see how they moved from generalities to specifics.

Indeed. If one knows absolutely nothing, they can’t hope for even moderately specialized technical jobs.

They are only qualified to be a CEO.

This doesn't really fit with my experience. Most PhDs do not continue in the exact same topic they did their PhD in.

You hire a PhD if you need someone that can do research. It's a bonus if you find an exact match to your research area, but it is certainly not a strict expectation.

Look outside CS, and in CS outside the ‘big tech employs all the engineers’ era.

Of course if you can get a 400k software engineering job, you’re going to choose it over a 140k research job in your field.

A bit presumptuous to assume this is about PhDs leaving academia for cushy bigtech jobs.

My coworkers are all PhDs, people whose PhDs were in topics like QCD working on completely unrelated computational physics, various biology, chemistry PhDs doing experimental physics, astronomy etc (and vice versa). I am considered strange for still working on the same topic as my PhD.

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