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Ph.Ds in IT - Good or Bad for a Career?
LordNimon asks: "I'm thinking about getting my Ph.D. (I currently have a Master's) in computer engineering. I've heard all sorts of stories about Ph.Ds being less likely to find a job than their less-educated counterparts, but not a lot of credible evidence. So, I was hoping to hear from Slashdot readers on their experience. Do you think getting a Ph.D. in CompSci or CompEng will improve or worsen my career outlook in the industry? Has anyone witnessed someone being turned down for a job because he had too much education? If you're a hiring manager, what is your opinion on someone who has a Ph.D. and is otherwise already qualified for the position?"
I not only saw this happen...I contributed to it.
We had an opening for an entry-level or mid-level developer position. Had a fellow apply with 2 masters and a Phd. I couldn't really see that the job would be challenging/interesting enough.
Most employers are not interested in being a way-station on someones career. I figure if I really need a job, tayloring the resume to suit the position is essential.
Having just interviewed more people than I wish to remember I would say that a PhD doesn't hurt you when looking for a job. The problem is that if you have only gone to school for many years and have no real software development work under your belt, that will hurt you if your looking for a development job.
Of course if you want a research position then a PhD is the only way to go. You probably need to end up asking yourself what you want to do and figure out the best way to get there. Getting your PhD is right for some paths, going to work is right for others.
My PhD was based around networked information systems like the Web and Gopher, back in 1992-1996. My PhD improved my technical skill set a little, with extra programming experience, and early awareness of protocols such as HTTP, and standards such as HTML. But the real advantages came from the other part of earning a PhD - the ability to present your ideas to others, whether that's on paper, or stood at the front of a room. The ability to organise my thoughts, to analyse problems and come up with solutions, to think outside of the already known base of information and come up with new ideas, to manage my own time, these were all the skills that I picked up between graduating with my first degree, and being given my PhD.
As a manager looking to hire someone, I would expect someone with a PhD to have the skills mentioned above. But you can also pick up those skills "on the job", or just have them as innate abilities, so as ever it would come down to how you present yourself at the interview. Having a PhD would certainly not count against you.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never come across the "overqualified" argument myself, and I'm very happy that I had 4 or 5 years dedicated to researching something that I found extremely interesting, in a superb learning environment. I think the skills of analysis and logical thinking are very handy in the IT and programming enviroments.
- 2003-08-18 19:46:10 Ph.D.: Good or bad for career? (askslashdot,ed) (accepted)
I never said anything about IT in my post, because I don't consider a computer engineering or computer science to be part of IT.On a side note, apparently persistence helps when submitting stories:
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I strongly agree with the parent.
The only valid reason for chosing to do a PhD is that you really want to. Forget career - that should have nothing to do with your decision. Doing a PhD is hard work, and you will almost certainly go through times when you wish you'd never started and wonder if you should just cut your losses. On the other hand, it can be immensely rewarding, and will teach you a whole new way of thinking.
As for jobs afterwards, outside academia at least, it's a lottery. Some companies value them, others don't. So that shouldn't really affect your decision.
I would probably be happier as a professor, but I may not find a tenure-track position at a university I like. In that case, I would try to find a job in the industry, but I wanted to see if getting a Ph.D. would close more doors than it would open.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
1. More likely to leave for reasons beyond our control (even if we do our best to make work happy, they may decide to go off and do research or go teach)
2. Less likely to work well in the compromise-heavy environment required in commercial development (prefer an elegant solution; sometimes to the point of a huge productivity loss for everybody else, when all that was needed was a select-sort or some other quick get-it-done-because-it's-late solution)
I've worked with a lot of PhD's despite the two caveats above, and have generally observed that if you can get the right PhD in the right position, you can play to their strengths. This usually means hiring them for an architecture position where they can interact with professional organizations; do long-range planning; write neat prototypes; all that kind of stuff that heads-down developers rarely get to do (and which the PhD might be better at anyways).
However, putting a PhD in a development position has been uniformly disastrous at all three companies (huge, medium, and startup) I've worked at. Even at the senior developer level, there's too much compromising and too much "wiring code" to make most PhD's happy; and their tendency to pursue elegance at the expense of expedience no matter what the situation can slow everybody else down too.
and I'm making well above the average salary for a programmer/analyst in Canada for the age 21-29 range (i'm 23). I started at a standard salary but worked hard (and smart) and proved that I deserved to be making as much as the more experienced guys. It looks like I will have a senior on my title within 2 years at this rate. All this with surfing slashdot on a regular basis as well.
;)
:).
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I would say that what really matters is how well you perform on the job. A phd may affect your ability to get your foot in the door (whether because a phd would command more respect or, in contrast, reek of "academia") and may affect your starting wages, but that's all moot after your first review.
About the only thing I can say is you may be making a bit less than someone with only a masters because you don't exactly get to use a lot of the theory you picked up. And you may have a catch-22 with the whole "over-qualified" for entry level (because of the PHD) but under-qualified for senior positions (due to lack of practical experience). And in the end, you may be bored a lot of the time with easy work - I know I am.
I have a co-worker with a phd (but not in comp eng) and he's pretty much treated the same as all the others around here. He's not an exceptional programmer, but he never complains about his salary (unlike, say, the guys in PC support
Of course, this is Ask Slashdot, so you're only going to get a bunch of anecdotes anyways =) YMMV
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
1) There are lots of tech people out of work, so you could very well be over-qualified with a PhD or even a Masters.
2) There are a lot of people out there to work the grunt jobs, and fewer people getting a higher education in IT. This could be an advantage.
It is all going to depend on what companies are around you. If they are all small, private companies doing web work, you may be out of luck. If you are near an IBM office, or some other tech giant who may have a use for someone with a PhD, then you could have a chance.
It is a real issue that people can be overeducated for a lot of jobs.
I used to work at Motorola, and we hired a contractor that was really smart. He was hired to help us test a release of some real-time cellular products. He had worked at NASA for years, and had some good stories. But he was worthless as a "regular" employee. He kept 3 sets of notecards in his shirt pocket, each set being a different color. One color was for process stuff, one was for technical stuff, and the other was for something else. When you would tell him something he would whip out his notecards and write it down on whichever category it fit into. If you ever wanted information from him, he went to his notecards. He was a good guy, and really smart, but he was too smart for the job.
I worked with another guy at a small company who didn't know Unix, but said he could learn it. He had a Masters and was working on his PhD. (I was surprised he didn't know any Unix, but whatever) We thought he was capable of picking it up, but he clearly wasn't. Two months after he started, he still had to refer to his notes to remember how to list a directory's contents. He was a smart guy, but he just didn't get it.
My suggestion? If you go for the PhD, do something in the computer security field. There will always be a need for computer security gurus, and in that field you'll be up against snot-nosed kids for the jobs. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Heh yeah. I interned one year for Agilent in Santa Clara. I was talking to one of the guys who worked in Agilent Labs where they got a lot of hot-shot Stanford Ph.Ds who thought they were god's gift to engineering applying for jobs. When interviewing they would watch for the types that obviously had the education but didn't really know what they were talking about and just start to fuck with them. Start zeroing in on what they didin't really know and start asking in-depth questions and getting them completely trapped in their lies. Apparantly a simple "I don't know" would have been the correct answer and some of them probably would have gotten the job if they had sucked it up and said that. I was told some of them ended up leaving in tears as it was not-so-pleasantly revealed to them that they didn't know as much as they thought they did...
Note that this isn't against all Stanford Ph.Ds. Just the horribly arrogant ones who feel a need to point out they have Stanford (or some other famous school) Ph.Ds every 15 minutes rather than actually doing any work...and I think we've all dealt with one of them at some point...
That said I'll have my MS in 3 years and leave it at that. Maybe I'll go for an MBA at some point.
I'm not an IT guy, but here is the salary break down I had vs. degree. I did not get my PhD but one of my friends did and he shared with me his interview results (actually all of my college friends did, it was a valuable resource in pushing for the highest possible salary).
:(
B.S. EE - $47/yr
B.S. Computer Science - $43k/yr
B.S. Computer Engineering - $48k/yr
B.S. EE/B.S. Comp E - $52k/yr
B.S. EE/B.S. Computer Science - $48k/yr
M.S. EE - $73k/yr
M.S. Comp. E (this was a new program)- $69k/yr
M.S. Computer Science - $65k/yr
PhD CS - $67k/yr
PhD EE - $55k/yr-$75k/yr wildly varying based upon specialty. Those specializing in control or power systems were at $55k, those specializing in Semiconductor Fab related stuff were up at the $75k.
Most IT salaries I knew were BS only and fell around the $45k mark. This was over the period 1996-2001, around New York City. New York is not exactly a hub of geekdom, I work at Bell Labs (aka Lucent - We outsource/resell the things that make communications work) which is about the only major technology company in the area, and was in the middle of all offers I received. (Am I wrong? Who else is in the area...) New York DOES have a lot of banks and hired a lot of IT guys in it's time, however I hear those jobs are in india now
My opinion formed on this data is that a PhD has absolutely no financial value regardless of degree. It is a research degree however, which means if you want to do research and you don't want to be someones lab assistant, you MUST have it. This agrees with how things should be. You do not want people getting PhD's for the money.
That said I can't imagine that there is a lot of active research in IT, and I think if I had that degree and was considering a way to boost my career viability I would consider an MBA. I take my own advice and that is the degree I will pursue next fall. There is such an intense lack of technically competant businessmen in the world, and contrary to popular opinion, it really is hurting everyone.
I have a (very old) Bachelors in CompSci.
I've never been asked to prove it.
I have a Ph.D. in both Comparative linguistics and Paleoanthropology, I've never been able to get a job at either!
The question to ask now that I'm coming to the end of my working lifetime is, Was it worth while?
I think that the answer is YES!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
in the last 5 years, I havent reported more than 1 step from a CTO, and the most fitting question I ever got in an interview was this:
"how many cotton balls would it take to fill the cabin of the last plane you flew in, assuming you have flown recently"
it is not the *answer* that counts here, it is how you deal with order of magnitude questions.
you would be amazed how many times you're in a huge meeting full of suits and your CTO asks you "so how much would it cost to build a 25TB san from scratch versus buying one from EMC?"
they are interested in an order-of-magnitude answer, and they fully expect it right then, not hours or days after the meeting.
saying $4 million when the price is $5-6 million is FINE for their purposes at that point. not being able to tell them whether it is $5 million or $500,000 is absolutely NOT okay.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I have a PhD in computer science. Like many, I went down the path not because I wanted the money or the fame. It was just there, in front of me, and I decided I wanted to try to see "what to be a researcher" was like. I never thought of the future jobs, the years of poor TA salaries, or the like. But man, did I enjoy it! The 7 years it took me were sometimes difficult (plenty of stress to finish the darn thesis) but at the same time were very good: plenty of travel to conferences, being able to do _whatever_ I wanted with my time, being able to learn and pursue anything that look interesting in front of me (to a certain extend), and the great feeling when you see your name in your first research articles, and later in citations.
I recommend you read a book called: A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science
by Peter J. Feibelman. It is a little bit biased towards the academic jobs, but it has a chapter on the "real world" jobs too. I wished I had read it many years before.
About me? I finished school and got a job at the Big Blue. I proved to myself I was able to create software in the Major Leagues, but then I realized I was being under employeed (my research skills were underutilized). In Canada there are few places better than them to go to, so my only alternative was academia. I am now tenure track at UVic.
The perfect job exists for few. In my case, I am happy and I am making the best out of it. My PhD has allowed me to pursue things in my life that might have been impossible otherwise (how many people would "kill" in Canada for a well paid job in Victoria, for example?). I would do it again, for sure, if I had to go back in time.
On the other hand, I have seen many crack under the pressure. You can be made to believe that you are an ass, with no potential to have a "contribution" to science. Many people struggle to find a thesis topic for years and many fail altogether. I must be very hard to feel the failure of not completing. Many others don't know what to do with the PhD when they finish and end with jobs that they could have gotten with a Ms.
Make sure you heart wants the PhD. Otherwise you might just waste some years until you decide it wasn't for you.