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Google's Ph.D. Advantage
Frisky070802 writes "The New York Times reports on Google's success and desire in hiring Ph.D.'s (free registration required). It says that Google's willingness to let every employee spend 20% of his or her time on an independent project is a compelling motivator and that they estimate that Google has as many Ph.D.'s working for it as Microsoft, which is 30 times larger. How many other companies put "Ph.D. a plus" in their want ads?"
BS = (obvious)
PHD = Piled Higher and Deeper
Besides, I'm guessing that a lot of those PHD's independent projects have something to do or might eventually be integrated into google (PHDs researching information retrieval, web page ranking algorithms, you name it).
OK... I know the Tech industry is on it's way back up (i'm hoping), however, when I was job hunting most of the companies I was looking at didn't want anyone with a Ph.D because they couldn't afford to pay those people with them. I'm guessing Google can afford to pay them now.. or atleast will be able to soon enough :)
Hmmm.
Quite a few. Any kind of scientific research, for example.
Google is proof that using a smarter aproach is often the best way to solve a problem. If Google tried to use the naive clustering model their expenses would have massivly higher and their scalability and fault tolerance would have been much lower. It seems that Google realizes that the best way to hire and retain the people that will continue to come up with the smarter aproaches is to offer them things that not many other employers are, time to do what intellectually stimulates them for instance.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
On this page, they claim to have only 50 Pigeon Harvesting Dogs (PHDs). Now they're up to 700? Wow....
Good for Google, but let's hope they don't get carried away.
I remember when a local telecom company tried to up-size their education level. They insisted that *everyone* in the building have a university degree. No exceptions. This meant that janitors, cafeteria staff, etc. had to have university degrees to mop floors or serve burgers. As I recall, they changed this policy after about 6 months.
PHD = Permanent Head Damage
Once you get Ub3r Big and popular you need more JD's
96
Although having an advanced degree is great, some of the best tech sector innovators come without advanced degrees. -- Also most employees spend more than 20% of their work time on personal goals anyway.
A bunch of Tech Stuff
This is what is known as "being over-qualified", and it's a killer. You wouldn't think that, after all that hard work in getting through school and finally getting a doctorate in a hard science or engineering, you'd have trouble finding work, but you do. Ever see a PhD working a helpdesk? Not a tech PhD, that's for sure.
Also, the amount of free time provided to PhDs at Google to do their own thing seems like it would be pretty standard - after all, they've hired the best and the brightest, how else do they expect to retain them? Isn't this standard at other companies, too?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
How many other companies put "Ph.D. a plus" in their want ads?"
How about: Every company which does any kind of research?
Seriously. In areas like biochem, getting a job (or at least, a good one) without a PhD is near-impossible.
I've been extremely surprised at finding out what people here have advanced degrees and which ones dropped out of college to take jobs back in their day.
go ask an employment agency if it helps in a job , you see if every buisness wants degrees/phd's then they become the norm in order to gain employment and so less valuable
with USA not even in the top 10 of educated nations whatever you are teaching in these degrees/phd's its not very successful
If PH.d's were so great, then the world's best corporation would be the U.S. Government. The fact is, original ideas are not born out of research, but inspiration.
Face it, salaries in the NHS and universities are shite so when you try to find a job in the real world you better not tell them you have a Ph.D. That would put you in the overqualified category which is another way to say that you are either too old or you are threatening some people already in place in the company... not a good way to start.
Me, after looking for work (from a postdoc) over and over again, I swallowed the little pride I had left and took that techie job I always dreamt of... not. Still better than being on the dull, I guess... pays the bills anyway.
Why, yes! I am bitter.
If you have a Ph. D and you're working at Google, you've got a great job. Ph. D jobs are worth the work for the degree, believe me. However, don't think you'll just be able to glide into getting that degree like you can with a BS... because professors will not just let you out! A Ph.D is designed to figure out which people actually can be creative and think of new stuff, and to keep out the "Ivan make basket" (you need communications skills) or "i learned it in 24 hours, and I think I'm a god now" (how many patents do you have? I thought so) folks.
stuff |
i have a PHD in engineering and so far i can't help feel it was a waste of time in regards to gaining a good job, so much so i have seriouly been thinking about becoming a plumber ! yep i can earn more money and have a better quality of life as a plumber than i can as a PHD wealding engineer, even the emploment agencys say "i see you have a PHD but do you have any experience outside of academia ?"
Do any of the mods actually click on the link?
That link takes you to a registration page. Please mod this one down.
Courtesy of bugmenot.
I always thought Microsoft had more phd than Google. Wait, is it spelled fud or phd? See? Their phd has already phdded my fragile mind! Ah, phuk 'em.
I also reply below your current threshold.
The article doesn't actually say Google has as many PhD's as Microsoft, only that Google has recruited as many PhDs from Washington University as Microsoft has.
Mod parent up!
If you can finish original research and a dissertation, then most likely you can finish any project handed to you if you have acheived a PhD. Most likely! All of the "high-end degrees are unnecessary" whiners never had to teach, research, write, suffer an advisor, AND find time to sleep all for 12000USD a year and a tuition waver. My advisor makes every boss I have ever had look like Caspar Fucking Milquetoast. Science PhDs tend to be particularly motivated, but don't discount us social science types, just because we want our summers off and tenure someday. ;-)
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
These efforts have yielded some well known products, such as Google Alert and Google Dance Tool. Would be interesting to see how these API offerings will react to Google's IPO.
I work at a research lab of roughly 2000 people or so. The majority of employees are engineers (all kinds), math, phyics, chemistry, etc, majors. We have a lot of opportunities for education including on-site masters programs in Computer Science, Electrical Engineer, and Ocean Acoustics.
There are also long term offsite programs where you can go get a Ph.D. and this is also popular. However, of all the people that I know here with Ph.D's the majority seem to migrate into project management, essentially doing nothing but running a small team, writing proposals and giving presentations. Eventually they move into fulltime management where they even give up driving the technical direction of the programs they may at one time have created.
It's not only a matter of internal PhDs at the company which help along their R&D efforts. Thousands of developers outside of Google are using the Google APIs to create new Google applications. Some notable hits are BananaSlug and GoogleAlert (the latter of which is indeed the product of a PhD, according to this article). The fact that Google is able to tempt so many to build on their platform is another sign of their popularity with the academic nerdy elite.
How many other companies put "Ph.D. a plus" in their
Does that apply to those we get thru spam?
Aside from those in spam, I can tell you from my experience that some people who obtained their PhD's (in the Medical field) from respectable universities are more like a BSc level.
I'd love to work on something with someone else. Being the only coder where I work is a bit lonely :-P
How many PHBs have PHDs?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Someone with a Doctorate degree looks at a University, where labs and resources are for research, but everything will be owned by the school.
Any major company that does research, where ownership is the companies.
Google, where it appears you can profit from your own side jobs. The regular job is doing cool research too!
Good choices, for different goals.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Though I guess google isn't evil, so I don't see them doing it. And yes, this is mostly a joke, but it is something that is likely somewhat unique in a lot of ways. And stating the obvious here, google, seems to do a lot of things right, and it shows. I think google deserves to be paid royalties for people which follow their practices. Although I somewhat doubt that many, if any, others would be capable of successfully following suit.
Anyone can hire PhDs. Even the government. But there may be a corporate culture that doesn't take risks, that cares too much about short-term profit, that is affected by political considerations. In Google, the nerds seem to run the show. They have the business people, and great branding. But the technical side of things is the priority.
Mod parent up!
I was applying for temp work and the first agency said I was over qualified and probably wouldn't enjoy the work they could give me. They said they'd look if they really wanted me to but then never got back to me with any jobs.
After that I went to some more temp agencies, but I dumbed down my resume. Instead of "software engineer" I was a "computer programmer". I put a 2.2 GPA (my school doesn't officially give out GPAs anyways...). Most of the skills in my skills list were removed and I replace them with my hobbies. All references to money, like how much money I saved a company, were removed.
Suddenly I had 2 offers for jobs at one agency and 1 offer at another agency. They were the same types of jobs that the first agency was giving out. It's surprising the number of companies willing to pay $14/hour for dumb ex-computer people.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I have a B ASc (Mechanical) Honours (4 year).
Many people with less education, like some 2 year design college grads think they got the same education. I took all of calculus in 2 courses, it took you 3 years, obviously my instructors were better.
If you haven't taken it, you really shouldn't discount it as worthless.
Now as to the value, good grad school research can be valuable. You can probaly get better technical direction than a typical work project, and might have the time to do it technically right.
You can take grad courses which are more advanced and ideally generate some new theory or ideas on your field.
It is correct that most of this doesn't typically apply directly to the normal job as a code monkey. However it can certainly add value if you delve into similar fields.
Even if you are working in an 'unrelated' topic, the advanced knowledge you gained might be somewhat transferable.
At the very least you will have had the opportunity to apply the years of education to a problem, and make judgements on how to attack it. If you actually get your Masters PhD at the end, you should have even done a not awful job of it.
What is innovation? - you can be coding monkey without a PHD - sure. If you like it then don't get a PHD. But where has the real innovation come from?
The transistor? Nuclear weapons? Drugs that save your ass? What other technology came out of Bell Labs?
The real innovation in our society is done for the most part by people with PHD's. Amazon.com, eBay - these are small innovations compared to the above. The groundwork was laid by the PHD's creating the underlying technology.
Boris
A lot. Very few make use of it though...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Um, anyone else want to try and pump up the Google stock price hype ?
Well if it wasn't for the US (and Soviet) governments there wouldn't be the spacecraft whose missions so often make it to the front page of this site. Not satelite TV. Nor thousands of medicines. And without universities, who duck the corporate need for the quick profit grab, there'd be no BSD, no Turing, and no Newton.
I would defy the poster to name a single world changing product in science, technology and medicine that has not come about as a result of massive, detailed and prolonged research.
Fine, some arise from the back-garden boffins like the monk and his runner beans, dyson and his hoovers, and the bloke who invented the cats-eye and is now one of the richest self-made men in the world, and others arise through the corporate route (a la Jobs and Gates), but common to these cases, as well as the thousands of advances that come through the government and university sectors, is the absolute necessity for the product or idea to go through rigourous testing and research before it is capable of use in the outside world.
There is some role for inspiration but the fact remains: without a detailed grounding in your field your flash of inspiration is likely to have been thought of before; if it has not been applied it is probably because it requires you to do a hefty chunk of research to prove the theory.
There are no, or few, free rides left. If anyone finds one, send it my way!
The article never even states how many Google employees have PH.D's anyway - only that it is probably more than 100 (out of 1900).
That is slightly over 5%. Sure, in many industries that would be very high but at a tech company - I am not so sure - and for a mature research organization that might be low (the drug industry or checmical companies).
However, the real advantage is that the *encourage* employees to perform independent research and that they hire people with that mindset. The PhD is a predictor of that mentality but the culture is what makes it work.
In my industry (mental health) a Ph.D is something that is not actively sought by hiring professionals, and may actually be a hindrance. Masters degreed therapists are cheaper for you and insurance. In addition, there is a bias (in my opinion well supported) that Ph.D's are "lab rats" and do not focus as much on their skills as a therapist. That is why the Psy.D degree was created, in order to differentiate between researchers and practicing professionals.
Results of the fight between "Ph.D. a plus" and "MCSE a plus"
;)
(The winner is: "MCSE a plus")
It's the scientific way
Because that will be the end of them. Not in the short term, but in the longer term.
Once they start running the quartal economy race, I'm sure quality of Google will go down the drain and it will be the end of a good search engine. Google will end up as a bastardized Alta Vista (pay and get higher rankings) or it will start transforming into more and more of a TIA database than it is today.
The page you reference is a great example of how statistics can prove anything. Your page lists school life expentancy. The differences are explained by the fact that many countries require 13 years of compulsory education vice 12 in the US. Look at the numbers here. Now look at average years of schooling which includes non-compulsory eduction. By gosh, the US is number one.
90% or more of start ups and product launches fail, mostly in the first year. That track record is not a
a good argument for using a 'traditional' business model. There is no doubt Google has beaten the odds, and they have done some things differently. I.e. the radical notion of becoming profitable *before* the IPO.
Google is a good case study. Everything they do should be reviewed for lessons in success.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
To be honest, when Google flew me to California for an interview, I was luke warm about the idea of working for Google because I love my life style living in the mountains of Northern Arizona.
:-)
However, after spending a day being interviewed by 6 extremely bright and creative people, I very much wanted the job (I did not get it, oh well). It is true that bright people want to work with other bright people. Anyway, it may sound strange, but I view the interview process as a very positive experience (also, after 30 years of working, it was the only job that I tried for that I did not get, so I was able to set most ego stuff aside). In addition to the interviews themselves, I got to have lunch with Peter Norvig and before I left the Google campus a nice person let me ride a Segway
It really is true that a few very good people are way better than many above average people.
One of the most fun times in my career was when I had a boss who has a PhD from MIT and hired many other PhDs and MSs from MIT - some of the best colleagues that I ever had.
Personally, I think that I am going to invest in Google stock, but I am likely to wait for a few months after the IPO (or make a low bid for the IPO).
-Mark
Not for what Google does. This is stuff that generally isn't the material of undergraduate courses, even advanced level. The stuff google is doing is so complex that you need a very strong background to even get to the point that you can use your creativity to solve problems.
There may be a very few people out there who have the background to do what google requires and don't have Ph.D.'s. For their innovation in algorithm design, such people will be rare. At that level, the coding is the easy part.
This American Magazine article was mentioned in the NYT piece. I can't find it anywhere! Does anyone have a copy or an excerpt?
A phd doesn't imply anything. If it comes with good work, and good recs and from a top univ, then you might be considered smart and productive; if you haven't done anything with your 5/6 years, and your recs are bad, then you are an overpaid donkey. and every permutation in between.
just as technology follows a path from small company/innovative to commoditization, so does ed requirements in an industry; its not that anyone needs a phd, but many cutting edge technologies come out of universitys, and those people have phds.
Google is fortunate - they have a monopoly posistion (at least de facto for now) and that allows them to hire top talent; as soon as the cash flow drys up, the phds go; look at the formerly world class att res labs.
There are a small number of companys that consistently do good science, such as ibm and corning and 3m; i suspect they hire phds because innovation is a character trait of people who are not interested in money, and those people often wind up getting phds, because it is a fun way to get to play with toys and do cool stuff.
I don't think this proves anything. Firms like microsoft specifically go out of their way to hunt down prodigies BEFORE they enter a PhD program.
I know of at least one other firm (SUPER brain tank) that goes out of their way just to recruit students right after college.
Why you might ask? Because some of these people are already ULTRA advanced, and you want to grab them while they are young BEFORE they get sucked into academia. What does a PhD prove? That you can learn on your own?
Alas, my experience with Ph.Ds in the workforce has been less than satisfactory. I can recall one gorilla with a Ph.D at a former employer who could not seem to get anything done. Poor slob; his first manager, the poster child for the definition for PHB herself, could not seem to find a way to dismiss him. Instead, she transferred him, with no warnings or cautions to the receiving organization. He ended up working on a project I was on. It was dismal! ... It took close to a year for the company to "get it" and release him.
Yet, my last boss at my last job before I retired had a Ph.D. A most brilliant fellow. Able, capable, competent, easy to work with. I suppose that in retrospect, I stayed even longer than I might otherwise have because he, and his boss too, were so easy to work with.
The wheel is in the "garden shed" category to be sure, but it went through its own prduct cycle: initially as a Potters' Wheel then attached to two wheeled-carts before being used for sturdier four-wheeled vehicles.
"PS: I'm also planning to get a doctorate in EE
"
Why? Oh God, why? The world DOESN'T need yet another candidate in a mature, over-supplied saturated field. Why not go into genetics, or biotechnology, or medecine? You know, fields were you actually get paid?
i work at an investment bank on wall street and everyone in my group has a phd, (except for me, i have a masters). in my field of work, quantitative finance, looks like i'll be forced to go back for my phd because just about everyone in the field has it...and jobs for those with MS only are getting tougher to find in this field...
What has this got to do with the topic? I am about sick of /. these days. More political crap being slung than on Slate.
On a side note, The University of Northern British Columbia, UNBC, has recently halved their tuition for Master degrees and removed tuition completely for their PhD programs. Granted, it'll still be a couple of years before they offer a PhD in CompSci, but one can't complain about being free.. I guess they're doing this because they want to become a more research oriented university - and it sucks to live in northern BC... trust me, I know.. (On the bright side, there are some great profs and a really low student/prof ratio. And the cost of living - I'm paying $300/month cnd, everything included.)
They get to spend 20% of their time in their own project. I wonder what that means. 20% of what time? From what I understand, people at Google work very long hours (out of choice mostly). Someone who worked 40-hour weeks at a regular company would have a lot more time to spare in their own projects. Having said that, I really agree with the sentiment of hiring the best and brightest and letting them do their own thing.
I recently had an interview with google where it was painfully obvious to me that all of the following were true:
1. That nobody had read my resume
2. That the technical interviewees hadnt more than a basic understanding of unix or networking
3. That they took me for a sucker by offering sub-standard salary in exchange for stock and working a 'cool' company.
4. That the interviewers were more interested in talking about themselves.
Had they bothered to even read my resume the would have known that I was a veteran dot-commie with several IPOs and founders stock. That I had used the 'we are cool, you want to work here and take sub-standard pay in exchange for stock' line more times than they had and that I knew that this was not 1996 anymore.
They would have know that I have several patents and that I know the technology that their product is based on better than the interviewer and perhaps would have put their junior interns to interview with me instead of their pretty-boy prestige PHD types who have 0 real world experience.
Had they read my fucking resume the would have known that I didnt want an entry level job at their 'cool comapny' for a 1/10th the pay I am accustom to and that I would have quickly passed my collegues or done my very best to expose them for the idiots they are.
Cool changes like the winds off Candle Stick Point google should know this, if they dont, they're in for a nasty suprise once their keystone investors make their returns.
My is name withheld to keep the idiots in Google's HR department safely blinded by their own ambition and perceived sucess.
Yay let's bash Bush, since I guess it's not quite as sheeplike as bashing "Micro$oft"... sigh.
evil adrian
well maintaining and developing a search engine is no less than rocket science or brain surgery. we want more minds coming from different educational backgrounds for far more better results, revolutionized and intelligent concepts that will change the way we search things on the internet. Is GOOOOOOGLE listening.....???????
To circumvent The New York Times required "free registration," click here.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
In my area of Vancouver (where we take coffee very seriously), most of the Starbucks shops unofficially require you to have a university degree. They say it creates a coffee house atmosphere. I'm not sure how true this is, as the barista is usually so busy with orders that our most complex conversations include, "You're out of stir sticks" and "A non-employee is soliciting money from your customers."
-- SYS 64738 --
We use it all the time to do jobs, er, get jobs for people
I think another poster hit the nail on the head when he said that PhDs are overqualified in a teeny, tiny area of study that only they actually care about. However, the "Doctor" title brings out the Ego in many of them, disabling their critical thinking skills (i.e. - "This project is a total waste of time and will never come to anything"). In essence, they're the reason many failed projects go horribly overbudget before they finally die.
http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=http%3A%2F%2F www.nytimes.com%2F2004%2F06%2F06%2Fbusiness%2Fyour money%2F06digi.html
Sorry that was poorly written.
I have had community college engineers with only 2 calculus course tell me they know "all of calculus".
I had 3 calculus courses, then 2 differential equations courses. They seem unable to grasp there is more to learn beyond what they have been taught.
I think it would be similarly ignorant to assume that advanced degrees are a waste of time.
Don't worry we woudn't hire you either....to damn bitchy
what?
Is that really something to be proud of? How many Ph.D.'s does MS hire anyways? I believe their business model calls for programmers, not researchers. You don't get a Ph.D. so you can get a job patching up security flaws in Windows XP.
Its like saying that the small record store down the street sells more CDs than supermarket that is 30 times larger. You are comparing two very different kinds of stores.
Wake me up when they have more Ph.D.s than a university or defense subcontracter (or any other business that actually hires Ph.D.s) that is 30 times their size.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
It's a complete reflection on the founders' failures to achieve their own PhD's.
I say, "good for them." I've worked with a number of PhD's over the years, and they were all great programmers and software engineers, though none of them studied Computer "Science!" As for me, usually their peers in the organizations, I dropped out of high school, and make 75% as much as them. I figure the price of going back to school for the PhD is not worth the extra salary. I mean, we both end up taking orders from the same and a totally different type of beast... the MBA. I wonder how many of those Google has on the management side? Or is the place just a bunch of scientists banding up to show what kind of cool things they can make, like PARC to which the article refers. Anybody been there lately? There's still some PhD's hanging around making cool stuff. And an eerie of pride for the rich history of innovation, and embarrasment for the failure of any long term financial success to keep the place flourishing. Just like the Google founders, incredibly proud for making what they have, and incredible shame for not finishing what they set out to in the first place - their degrees!
Hmm?? ;-)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
But if after all of this schooling you are unable to make yourself into a millionaire or at the very least break even on the cost of your education from birth to PhD then POO ON YOU!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Not many, most have "PhD required". I should get a PhD in hotel management or underwater basket weaving to at least get my foot in the door.
> It's one thing to be working with intelligent, science-oriented people. It's better to be working for intelligent, science-oriented people.
Consider the fates of companies ran by "intelligent, science-oriented people" like ArsDigita (account #1, account #2) and The MIT Blackjack Team.
Yeah, right.
Well, it's not really EE in the "has exclusively to do with electricity" sense, it's more in the direction of hardware verification, at the interface of computer science/mathematics of EE. I.e. proving mathematically that the Pentium does actually calculate FP divisions correctly, given a gate-level description of the chip. There's still quite a lot of work to do in this particular field. Some of the "standard" procedures were only invented in the early nineties.
Google 30 times smaller than Microsoft? How did they measure that? A logarithmic ruler?
I am about to finish my Phd in CS and during these long years, I came to realise that part of the Phd process is (maybe) to figure out what is this all about... be able to answer questions of the form "Does it help me to find a job?", "Should it be useful?" etc.
:-)
My take on this is as follows... It's not about finding a job... it's not about adding another bullet in a CV to impress someone... it doesn't have to be useful or practical.. it doesn't have to cure cancer (although some people do this for a phd)...
I think a phd is a long thought exercise. You prove to yourself (and to a bunch of other people) that in a finite amount of time, you can understand an area, the issues involved, and you can come up with something innovate, something new... a new problem or an new solution to an old problem...
how to get a job after all that, is an orthogonal issue... maybe deserving another phd...
Having intelligent bosses is good, but not all PhDs would make good bosses.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
True that.
BUSH SUCKS!!
I have a PhD, I'm currently in the UK, and I have to agree. PhD level jobs are very hard to come by in the UK at the moment. After working since the dot com bust in non-PhD level jobs, I applied to Google a couple of months ago. They have offered me a very good job, and I will probably take it. I can't stress enough though how disappointed I am with the UK/Europe that I have to go to California to get my dream job.
I thought that was a good way to find a GF b/c her Daddy is a PHD
Pappa Has Dough
This
But home manny MCSEs do they have?
This
Say it with me kids...PhD -ne Smart (at least not 1. common sense or 2. being able to follow directions)
I do computer support for an engineering department on campus. Means I deal with supporting PhDs (and masters students and undergrads). For many of the PhDs, this isn't an unfair generalization. They are so focused on their one little area of expertise, that they seem to loose all basic knowledge. This is an engineering department here, so people should have a little technical skill. None the less I've solved printer problems that stumped a room full of masters and PhD students by turning the printer on (really, twice). They ought to have the basic electrical knowledge and problem solving skills to figure this out. The DID at one time to pass the undergrad courses.
Now that's not to say there aren't some really smart PhDs out there. We have them here too and they are fun to work with. But there are plenty that aren't.
Working here has really shown me that having a PhD doesn't mean your smart, just means that you could play the game long enough and well enough.
By the time one becomes a PhD, they should know what is a significant, doable problem in their field. Masters students or beginning PhD students oftern choose the wrong-size problem. It may be something triviable and already doen by someone else. Or something that may take decades and gigabucks. A right-size problem can be done in about two years. Sometimes an advisor lets the student learn the hard way by letting the student work on a wrong-size problem. The coursework and skillset difference between a masters and PhD is often not that great.
Sure you might have nearly 100% turnover, but on what time scale? Someone who is a PhD is probably gone first chance they get, maybe even a month or two if they can find a better job that quick. Somone entering in to the tech industry you can probably get a few years out of. Hiring someone for a couple of months is just not worth it. The search procedure is time consuming (and therefore expensive) and it DOES take time to train someone to work efficently, even if they are highly (or over) qualified. If they skip after a couple months, after you finally have them trained, it's a looser for you.
Also lots of education does not equal highly competent, espically in customer service type jobs (which helpdesk is). Most of the professors here would be TOTALLY unsuited for the help desk and doa much worse job than our students that ear $8/hour. Even the professors best suited would only be on par with a deceant student. Yes they could be trained, but that takes time and if they skip as soon as that's done, it's a loss. Training takes staff time (and therefore money) in additon to meaning less efficecy from the person being trained.
who owns the fruits of their research. Most employment contracts in high-tech companies are pretty anal about that. No matter when and how you develop the code, even if your own spare time and using solely your own hardware and software, the company 0wnz0rz the code. And there are also provisions about conflict of interest...
It would be interesting to know how google manages all this mess.
No kidding. When I was looking for work a couple years ago, I applied for dozens of programming jobs, and only got two phone interviews, despite the fact that I've been writing software successfully for over 20 years.
Then I applied for a temp. teaching position at a local university. I was hired immediately, even though my only teaching experience was as a TA in the 1970's.
That's why people with PhD's are stupid, they work for 150k while developing technology that makes corporations millions. 150k for a person w/ a PhD is dirt cheap, but they haven't learned any better so they usually take a lot less than than. -Nazz
"MSCE and Ph.D" returned one result, and it was an OR condition - MSCE with 5+ years experience, or PhD with 3+ years experience.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Which is clearly the difference between the US and Europe, as the US currently gives out Patents for the most ridiculous stuff ever.
Just the other day, Microsoft got "A composite protocol system for reintegration of nebulon tubes while simultaneously dispersing intrusive or invasive window-images during a depression of the first actualization lever on a hand-held pointing device" for SP2's popup blocker. Or that's what I'm told.
There are two reasons to IPO--to generate capital to expand or to cash out. Certainly I can't image Google needs the former, and while I don't begrudge anyone the right to cash out on their creation, I hope they realize that by definition, they're giving up ownership. Maybe they're strong enough leaders, and will start off with enough shares to be ok--I certainly hope so becaue the list of technology visionaries who were ousted from their own company is already too long.
I guess I am cynical today.
Vote Quimby.
Being a non-degree'd individual, having worked at several places where the "degree" ratio was something like 70% PH.D, 20% MS, 9% BS and 1% non-degreed, I have found that for the most part I worked well there because I could come up with workable, real-world solutions. I often implemented what they think would be a great thing into something that actually would work. I good portion of what PH.D's seem to lack was just common sense and a good assessment of what technology can really do or what you can feasibly do on a real world budget.:) I do remember one company meeting we had to show us the latest presentation management put together to sell our company better because of declining contract awards. They couldn't understand why with so many PH.D's on staff why we weren't getting the lion-share of contracts. When presented with the slide containing the pie chart outlining our degree percentage, it added up to 102% which I (the non-degreed) guy pointed out.
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Yes, they are really great, are they not? I have heard they are working on the new "reversed filtering" (or "negative filtering") option of on images.google.com's SafeSearch. Now, that is what I call innovation!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
In a company controlled by PhDs, I would have every expectation that The Holding of the PhD (tm) would play first fiddle to material contribution.
No, I already know, up front, my long history factual and significant contribution would be ignored and I'd be given exactly zero opportunity to prove myself.
No, but thanks, I'm not available.
It is my opinion that college degrees don't do a whole lot more than independent study or apprenticeships can do for you. What could you possibly learn in a classroom that you couldn't learn on the job? Let's take IT as a great example. Universities have the damnest time keeping up with the rapidly evolving world of IT, and as such cannot possibly keep the latest and greatest information flowing into your hot little hands. I can't count the number of job applicants I've interviewed with BS and MS degrees that have no clue how things work.
Them: "Well, that's not how it worked in the lab."
Me: "Thanks for noticing. Now figure out how it really works!"
All the college system has served to do is place no value on the *real* learning of participating in the workplace and learning a trade. Instead of being able to apprentice under someone in the field you like, you now have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a sub-par education that has to be supplemented with years in the workforce anyway. When will we stop attaching so much value to a piece of paper that really isn't a testament to real-world knowledge?
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
It's incredible how many posts are generalizations from personal experience.
...).
Stating the obvious, it's not a perfect system. Moving from a bachelors to a PhD simply increases the chance that a candidate has been selected on intelligence. Thereafter, the quality of education depends on a number of factors (e.g., school, department, funding, advisor, personal life,
The true crime in education is at the undergrad level where too many high school applicatants are accepted. By so doing, the quality of education is compromised for those who do not belong - compressing B students with A students. This last effect makes it difficult to select students on intelligence when they apply to grad school or for professional degrees such as MDs.
Fascinating threads, both on- and off-topic. /. comments into a broad picture. Not just "a Ph.D. is worthless/you can't do anything without a Ph.D." but a whole array of different points.
As is often the case, the diversity of perspectives makes
Not much to add, probably, but my $0.02 anyway, focusing on my own perspective which happens to be exactly as worthy (neither more nor less) as anyone else's.
I'm a Ph.D. candidate in a non-tech field. You can't realistically be hired for academic jobs in my field without a Ph.D. and it's rather hard to be hired even with a Post-Doc. Of course, a lot of people I know work with "only" a B.S./B.A. or M.S./M.A. but none of them has the type of job I'm aspiring to, which happens to be academic.
There's a lingering feeling that college degrees are like honorific titles that "institutions of higher learning" thrust upon bright people. Of course, this feeling seems stronger with people who associate education with employment than with people who are driven by their passion for knowledge. For a variety of reasons, I happen to belong to the latter category: I'm an academic because I'm passionate about select academic subjects. Though I'm really looking forward to other phases in my academic career, I thoroughly enjoy the life I chose. Thing is, I'm not the only one like that. Sure, some grads constantly complain about not being free to do what they please but academia's incredibly satisfying for those who do it for the "right reasons." Yes, I'm helplessly naive in thinking I'll get a tenure-track position relatively soon, but since high school I've been prepared (by advisors, peers, etc.) to fight my way through.
In other words, contrary to popular belief, you don't begin your career after you get your degree. Your degree is an acknowledgement of a certain of things you have done at an educational institution and your career began with your choices.
Interestingly, I've been looking for menial/mindless work before I take up a teaching fellowship. It seems that my résumé showed me to be overqualified to flip burgers or force people to buy security systems but I eventually found work in a nearby café. It might surprise some, but I'm quite happy about this. The reason is, it's not necessarily about the money. It's about doing what you like and liking what you do.
Most of the time, doing so goes with inspiration, perspiration, fun, friendship, and most likely some beer.
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
...i'm looking for a job that says "college drop-out a plus" that doesn't involve cleaning solvents.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Companies talk about R&D spending, but very few software companies do much research; they simply develop products. Persuing new ideas that may not have direct impact on the next revision of code can find unexpected new capabilities, performance improvements, or other product improvements not thought of by product management or voice of customer sessions.
I truly hope the investment Google is making pays off and leads to other software firms following.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
Gross Generalization Alert!
My experience tells me otherwise, and it all depends on the program the person went through anyway. Usually, it's those with just a BSc who behave this way.
PhD students are supposed to learn techniques to solve problems never encountered before. Adaptability to problems is essential (again - depends on the program they went through). Some departments do this better than others, and no one tops physicists in this regard (math PhD's come close, though).
Beetle B.
I think one of the reasons behind Google's success isn't just the sheer number of PhDs they have. Its the PhD's having the power, rather than the PHBs (pointy-haired bosses).
Having a PhD and being a pointy-haired boss are in no way mutually exclusive. See: University administrators and officials.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
If working a helpdesk is being neck-deep in shit, then Tier 2 support is merely being waist-deep in it. Frankly, anyone with a college degree is too good for this kind of manager-dependent dronework for extended periods of time. Most people get Bachelor's degrees to avoid repair work, not to qualify for it. What you offer would be incentive to only the lowest levels of American employee.
Are your hiring practices so pragmatic when it comes to degree-less support technicans, I wonder?
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
If tons of people use my search engine, it might be possible to run the search terms through a few smart programs written by smart people and:
;).
:). I wonder what Microsoft would do.
1) Make money in the stock market coz you may have a good idea what people are about to buy/sell before they buy/sell it. OKOK, not easy to tell if buy or sell. But is it a hard problem?
2) Go figure the other related stuff yourselves
Set cookies and do some weightings and you might be able to group and weight the searchers/searches accordingly.
But Google says they're the good guys right?
But hey I'm no PhD.
You seem to imply that obtaining a PHD makes one more innovative -- I would simply argue that innovative, disciplined thinkers *tend* to pursue a PHD. Having the degree itself shows that you've done independent, unique work in your field. *Not* having the degree in no way implies that you can't do independent, unique work.
I work in the MechE field with many talented engineers. Some are PHDs, many aren't. They all do superlative, important work.
The problem with that line of argument is that the project given to the PhD will be late, too complicated, irrelevant to the project requirements, and subject to the perverse whims of the PhD.
Not that it would be any different for a non-PhD candidate, but at least a normal engineer would be cheaper.
Umm... i believe it was Al Gore who invented the internet. And he doesn't have no PhD.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
yea.. Masters of Systematic Cow Engagement are low demand these days.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Google's 1900 employees committed 15% to research (285) compared to MS's 700 full time researchers...ummmm, i don't see how this is even a comparison....
The first question they threw at me is a statistics/probability theory one. It's like how many bits you need to randomly assign a number to each person. My math was rather rusty then and failed that. The other ones are developing some algorithms under a very tight space/time constraint or both. I did better on those but still couldn't get an on-site interview.
jpenguin AT the google email service
I don't know what PhDs you or Soros know, but most of the ones I've been lucky enough to work with have theirs exactly because they have presence of mind, adaptability, and the experience of taking an idea and forging something new about it.
Also, configuring a W2k proxy server is roughly equivalent to plumbing, and has nothing to do with CS.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Here come the ignorant assholes who will knock on getting a Ph.D. because they can't get one. Sure, I'll accept that a Ph.D. isn't terribly practical for many jobs. Our department is hiring programmers right now, and I would probably veto a Ph.D. applying for our junior software engineer position. But I am sick of hearing everyone with lesser education cover for their insecurity and lack of accomplishment by knocking higher educational goals.
I work as a "Senior Software Engineer", doing serious C++ programming including use of Win32 API, Winsock, OpenSSL, MySQL, etc in a multi-threaded multi-server multi-system programming environment which powers telecommunication systems which require very robust programs capable of maintaining the best uptimes possible. There are many developers who do work that makes my job look simple, but considering I only have an AA in CompSci, I think I am doing fairly well. I work on the same level as individuals who have BSCS in CompSci and some who have 20 years experience in development. However, I don't have a lack of appreication for their superior education and experience. I am working towards my own BSCS, Master's, and maybe even Ph.D. someday. Not to try to bring in a major paycheck (I already do very well), and not to try to be better than those who only have a BSCS, but because Computer Science is my field. It is my study, my hobby, and I have dedicated my life to it. Since I consider myself a (budding) Computer Scientist, it is simply my responsibility and my desire to continue to advance in the field and learn everything I can about all of the many aspects of Computer Science.
People with vocational certificates (MCSE, CCNA, etc), are often fine employees to do the work they've been trained to do. I find Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science from trade schools like Coleman College to be offensive mockeries of a real BSCS, which I have worked for years to gain, while they took a few classes in outdated languages like COBOL and FoxPro. (We have one such person working in our customer service department.) But people who actually attend a university, any real university, and learn the science of computers, are a league above those who would criticize what they cannot attain.
Just because you couldn't make it in college doesn't mean college has no value. Just because you didn't stick it out long enough to learn something, doesn't mean colleges don't teach CompSci principles which no self-taught person will understand and appreciate. The only reasons to not advance your education further are your own reasons, so to attempt to apply them to everyone and make blanket statements about higher educational levels than your own seems more like a desperate attempt to cover your insecurity that there might be people out there who know more than you do, even if your non-tech manager and your family members think you're the God of Computers.
A public owned company by its nature cannot show long-term intelligence, let alone be a cool place to work: Sooner or late, some new CEO with a million-dollar-a-week contract takes over and decides to cut costs -- short-term costs, of course, because he isn't going to be around for more than three or four years anyway. Shareholder value is the evil spell that turns work into hell every single time: You stop caring about the product (just some marketing-inflated object to impress the analysts with), you stop caring about the customers (who cares as long as they buy enough to keep the analysts happy), you stop carrint about your employess (just tools to be used for a s little cost as possible). Everything is reduced to that one single number -- by law.
If you work for Google, enjoy it while you can, because the end is near. Going public is a stupid move by Google, and the beginning of the end for a great company with great values.
Of course, even though financially I'm not ahead having gone to school, I think I'm ahead.
This fancy $50k piece of paper has given me the opportunity to have a nice job.
Good work environment, interesting work, more opportunity.
Sure my friends from HS working in a factory have a few year head start, and no education debt, but I think today I'm already living a better life.
They grumble about the monotonous job they do, I complain about the challenges I'm faced with.
I've got a new problem to solve every day (or every few minutes some days).
This is a bit of a problem with Google as well: they don't like to hire people without degrees. For the most part formally educated people will perform better than uneducated people. However, there are always notable exceptions.
From what I've read and my own experience Google won't hire anyone without a degree. I've got to wonder, would they pass over a young Bill Gates or Larry Elison?
I was funded by the NSF and DoD throughout grad school while getting my doctorate in physics. I never shelled out a dime.
My grad program had a filter for removing stupid people before they got into the second year called the 'written comprehensive exam' followed by an oral exam to be done in the second year to make sure you were worthwhile.
nearly all of my phd work went towards my thesis, not towards running around doing my advisor's work. If you find yourself in that position, find another advisor...
Everyone seems to have forgotten that the founders of google were working toward Ph.D. degrees at Standford when they were working 20% of the time each week on a search engine. I took many of the same classes Larry did during undergrad when Larry was just smug and didn't have the dollars to go with his attitude (his wallet has now caught up with his ego, I'm sure). I have a pretty good idea of where they came up with page rank, and that too was a Ph.D. project, only one that was very theoretical and dates from quite some time ago. That body of theory is still outside old-school computer science, and was no doubt viewed as worthless at one time, if not still so today by conservive schools of thought. The street seems to think that Ph.D. projects can be valuable--even very valuable.
All I have is a BA from a rather low grade college. I specialize in locking algorithms.
Even more lesser hacks and unpublished stuff which I don't have time to go into here.
Umm ... does a "doctor of Hamburgerology" count? If so, then that job at Mikky Dee's would qualify.
http://www.searchstars.com/jobseeker/jsadd.asp - you can even list your Burger degree on your online resume, so it must be legit!
PhDs applying for machine learning jobs get asked questions about sorting, data structures (prefix trees), programming, etc. For a PhD, stepping out of the academia, these questions tend to catch you off-guard. They are expecting more to be grilled about their research.
I'm not bashing Bush - just remarking on his less than average conversational abilities - a remarkable choice to lead a nation.
His language belies the fact that he does not seek or aquire information at a very high rate.
The chances are high that his comprehension is as stunted as his expresion - and as a consequence - its no wonder that the CIA fudges its way through the briefings.
"Mr. President - we have a security situation."
"I think you're overmissestimating the evil ones"
"Um ok Mr. President - but if anyone asks - tell them we read this to you - its called a "briefing" but you can call it a PDB because briefing sounds a lot like briefcase."
"ok. god bless. - you're doing a fine job in there."
- without bashing - may i suggest it is useful to put someone who CAN assimilute information in the ONE SEAT in this country that gets the information.
AIK
- not excited about the alternative either - thank you.
It has to do with the fact - that pHD are the perpetuation of wealth as much as intelligence.
Until we have an education system which is immune to historical prejudices (of which wealth is the common carrior) we will not achieve equality of opportunity.
And the answer to the question - what does it take to get a pHD will continue to be "Rich Parents."
AIK
The real 'thing' of it is that a Ph.D. ends up being a requirement you need when you can no longer get it easily. A MS and a PhD can get the same starting job, but after ten years working in the field the PhD (given they did decent jobs) can advance to a higher position easier and will have more paths open to him then an MS.
Some things I've read basically put a PhD as 5 years of work experience, a MS as 2 years, and a BS as 0.
Then again, you ask most science Ph.D.'s and they'll (as well as many liberal arts PhD owners/students) tell you flat out that a liberal arts PhD is completely pointless unless you want to be a liberal arts prof. Which, in short, is hard as hell to get a job at which pays you decently...(considering how much schooling you've done).
I've had 2 experiences with PHDs...
1. He was hired in a Director position he did not merit. ("oooh! Ahhh! a PHD! He so smart. He make us money!"). Pissed everybody off. Had a 24/7 "I'm the shit" smirk on his face, but little people skills. Had some worthy goals but really, didn't understand the industry he was hired into.
2. Needed a lead developer to port over a PC game and lead 3 other programmers under him. Hired a PHD. He demanded and got a high salary. He looked great on paper. He aced the company's tests. He talked the talk. Unfortunately, after 2-3 months he had jack all to show for. His social skills were nil. He didn't understand the technology involved. He wasted our time. He got fired.
A PHD means jack all if you're not productive.
I think part of the problem is people assume a PHD = genius. It doesn't.
If you've ever been at house parties hosted by early Googlers and filled mostly with herds of Google people endlessly yakking Googlespeak at each other, then you'd know that "An Army of PhDs" is very, very, very far from desirable in some circumstances.
Da Blog
Nor would anyone hire you for to cents either.
Right on!
I worked as one of two junior programmers at a startup (now dead), which at its height had approximately 10 or 11 people on the software side of things), and 5-6 of those were PhDs (and 6 or so hardware guys, I think half also had PhDs). Most all of these guys had very impressive resumes/CVs, and were being paid enormous salaries... though some were light on working in industry
Anyway, we were a small startup and I had heavy interaction with basically all members of both the software/hardware teams working on basically parallel processing. To make a long story short, having a PhD didn't lead to a correlation between being good at implementation OR design, or really anything. Out of 5-6, only one was truly good at actually programming/implementing, but I figured their strength was in their ability to help out designing some of the horrendously big and complicated stuff, and the algorithms underlying. However after over 2 years of work at this company, many code reviews, design meetings, etc, it was pretty clear having a PhD in EE/Comp Sci didn't particularly mean you had a handle on algorithms or design, either. I still vividly remember a presentation over a design prototype one of the PhDs had developed on his own (approximately 1-2 months of solo work) that was absolutely ripped to shreds at the most fundamental levels during a code review meeting. It was actually embarrasing to be in the room.
Anyway, my experience there pretty much killed whatever mystique or respect I previously had behind having a PhD. To me it seems to mean you 1) Did a research project, which may or may not have been relevant to anything at one point 2) Had 5+ years to do it 3) May or may not have learned a lot about the subject. I don't mean to belittle it, but I think in general theres a *lot* more fluff surrounding a PhD than meat.
According to Wikipedia, the NSA still has google.com beat by a long-shot when it comes to hiring Ph.D. mathematicians:
"Despite being the world's largest single employer of Ph.D. mathematicians, the single largest owner of supercomputers, and an organization with a budget that exceeds that of the CIA, it has had a remarkably low profile until recent years. "
I would imagine that was a typo, and they really wanted MS in CE, computer engineering. If you have a Ph.D. in comp e, you don't need as much experience.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Many folks don't pursue PhDs not because they lack they intelligence, but because it offers nothing to them.
The reason for that? I should say reasons; those are myriad, ranging from lack of time because of other worthwhile pursuits, to disgust of the current state of academics today, to a lack of any worthwhile application (even purely academic).
Since you HAVEN'T been through a serious postgraduate program (and yes, I have a PhD), I will chalk your comments up to a misguided sense of respect for certain types of academic qualifications... but at the same time, I find your views more than a bit disturbing. While those letters that come after your name can indicate a greater capacity for meeting certain challanges, by no stretch of the imagination should one pigeonhole various strata of intelligence, adaptability, and ability by said letters to the apparent level you have. To put it into perspective; my thesis advisor made it clear to me that while what I was pursuing was worthwhile, it did not qualify me. In fact, someone who had NOT received my credentials yet still had amassed the same amount of knowledge and come to the same type of creative thinking levels would be a much more lucrative individual to pick up... and apparently, situations like that are not terribly uncommon. What was he trying to say?
If you've got a NY Times link that requires registration, you can skip it by copying and pasting the original NY Times URL directly into regular Google Search.
If the article is relatively new, it will probably tell you "Sorry, no information is available for the URL" but will then offer you a link to the address you just typed in. The HTTP-Referer will then be google.com and you can read it without registration.
A few extra keystrokes, but gets around the registration process every time.
...it's bad news.
Standards are ok, but a company should always be willing to see potential in anyone, not just those with the (right) papers.
If hope set out is not proven with the chosen candidate, one can always discharge the person on a fair basis.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Nothing beats passion to solve a real problem and that is what google is trying to advertise with their bs phd number. Congrats for them, big deal, Broadcom did this for chips a few years ago, where are they now? People with phds are wimps that need a very large security blanket. That being said, it would be very interesting to see what would come from a phd that had to build a business from scratch (no handholding vc funding) and see what happens in five years. Google thinks that through hiring all these phds + 20% free time will provide an ample amount of passion to make it work. All it needs is one very passionate person running the show, unless of course they plan on a cut and run in a couple years when the competition catches up. Look at Apple, Sun, and Oracle, all companies with a CEO that were founded by and continue to produce cutting edge solutions, without anything close to a phd education.
pHD are the perpetuation of wealth as much as intelligence.
PhDs don't guarantee people to make a lot of money. A large fraction of PhDs become university professors -- a group not generally known for being rich. (Sure the big names get rich, but that's generally after putting in tons of work and doing world-class research.)
and the answer to the question - what does it take to get a pHD will continue to be "Rich Parents."
This isn't true either. The real answer is discipline. If someone has the self-discipline to complete an undergraduate program with high marks, they can typically get assistantships to get them through graduate school. Sure, they don't pay a whole lot, but they usually come with a partial or full tuition waiver. The total package is generally enough for a disciplined person to get by on.
You know, now that I think about it, that's one of the things that I *really* like about the Open Source community (and I could reasonably see terrifying folks).
Prestige and reputation doesn't mean a whole lot.
It's very hard to make arguments from authority when everyone can see your entire corpus of past work inside and out and criticize it and judge it. If you do good work, you do good work. If you do bad work, you do bad work. There isn't much else to say. It's hard to live on reputation. When you make a claim, you can easily be criticized or shot down unless you actually demonstrate a working counterexample. There's very little hierarchy, and (at least with the GPL and BSD licenses) if you don't like working with someone, you can fork the project.
Unlike pure academia (where a research paper usually makes only a small splash, and among people in the field), an open source project is an actual *device*, a machine, not just tools for making devices. It can be distributed far and wide, and affect a huge number of people directly.
I, like many other people, think that Google will eventually lose its engineer/science orientation, probably sooner than later when the IPO is considered. It's happened to many, many small companies as they turn into bigger companies and acquire deadweight, meetings, deadlines, crony consultants, etc.
May we never see th
Seriously, what the heck *is* up with people that cheat?
I just can't figure it out.
You pay some obscene amount of money, say, $30K/year to go to a university. Once you're there, you cheat? The degree isn't going to do much other than help convince employers to look at your degree. The education is the whole damn point of being there.
I'm constantly boggled by the kinds of interview questions that people on Slashdot mention that the people they're hiring *can't answer*. They're *basic*, standard questions.
May we never see th
When I was hired by my employers, a smallish software company (~20 people), I was the first non PhD employee they hired. (Not including secretaries, out of pure work discrimniation reasons...).
But I was the first with a computer related degree !?
I think they eventully realised PhD didnt equal good employees. Although it does indicate you are not too thick, by ripping of other peoples work to establish your thesis.
My other Sig is very funny.
The primary education system in the US is broken, but the secondary (university) education system in the US is still pretty sharp.
You know, if I had the opportunity to make changes to the public schools, I think I'd:
* Break down subject matter. Instead of having "fourth grade", you'd have the math that was in fourth grade, the writing in fourth grade, etc.
* Do evaluations on subjects in one month intervals (rather than one year). Failing a test that sets you back an entire year is a huge setback, and so there's enormous pressure on teachers not to fail students and parents to make teachers keep their kids moving. This is what seems to me to cause a huge chunk of the problems in schools. If you fail the test, you go over that month of material again next month, until you pass it. Furthermore, for schools that have "summer school for students that didn't pass", it's much easier to reteach the one month of content that didn't get finished and pass the student than to ram them through the entire year again.
* Deemphasis of lectures. Right now, teachers spend an enormous amount of time talking -- doing nothing other than reading out teaching notes or curriculum, and so forth. I could never figure out why this is a good idea -- they're just reading notes aloud, which is an expensive use of time and doesn't benefit students at all. Every minute a teacher spends reading aloud content is one minute that they cannot spend answering questions, which is really the only thing they can do that tapes/computer software/books/worksheets can't do. It drove me equally nuts that college professors frequently do the same thing (*especially* when a college professor basically reads aloud his notes, and then expects TAs to answer out-of-class questions -- if the university wanted to hire a public speaker, they'd hire a public speaker, and wouldn't need him to have a PhD). Furthermore, this would make make-up work much easier. I've never figured out the value of lectures -- if you're going to say something, you might as well just write it down. This also makes it easier for students to do work remotely, if they're with parents on vacation for a week or something.
* Increase the number of papers/research papers to write. I think that the times that I learned the most in K-12 was when I had to do something on my own -- not when the teacher was feeding me something and then making me regurgitate it. High-school/middle-school history was a great example of this -- I remember memorizing vast numbers of dates and thinking ("God, I hate history" and "History is a waste of time"). On a whim, I took a history class in college, where all the grading was done based on writing papers, and loved it. The emphasis is much more on learning and understanding what was going on and being able to clearly describe it than regurgitating rarely-used numerical data that lives in only short-term memory. If I can say "event X happened before event Y", that's much better than "event X happened on June 3rd, 1905". Grading papers requires additional teacher time -- however, the reduction in lecture time reduces it, so I think it'd be a fair trade.
* Several nonrequired classes should (IMHO) be standard required fare in K-12. Probability and Statistics is a big one -- most people picking up a degree in the social sciences are going to need some statistics, and probability is useful for a ton of fields, everyday life (and *terribly* useful in computer science), and it's not a required course. I also think that an anti-propaganda class (I really don't have a better term for this), perhaps a mini-class should be included. I took a speech class that served much of this role, and I think that it was incredibly valuable. It basically summarized the types of propaganda/bogus claims that people make, and the techniques used. In today's world, where people are targeted ever more heavily by marketers, I think that innoculating people against basic marketing tactics early on, or at least making them awar
May we never see th
Knowledge should be gained without having to remember things, and getting a dimploma should only entail remebering things that you are confident enough to remember. Right?
Cover your eyes and click this link!
That's only because somebody else was paying for them. But given the amount of bogus patents out there, the number of patents is perhaps not a good measure of creativity and knowledge.
You comments are valid regarding the myopic focus on writing tight code and ignoring the importance of maintainability.
Also along those lines are communication skills. I've just been through interviews for internships, and communication skills never seemed to be a factor. Prior experience won everytime.
As a former Support Engineer and Sales Engineer, I know my communication skills are way beyond average.
My point was there is more to life than money.
I think my degree got me a nicer job, not just a little more money.
One of the things I got from Infinite in All Directions - it was a delight to me, and I've been quoting it ever since - is that you honor inventors as much as scientists.
It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
Is it the scientists who are putting them down?
Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types.
Are there other kinds?
There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them, too.
Is that a weird British hangover?
It's even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2,000 years.
How would you stop this intellectual snobbery?
I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
Are those getting PhDs rewarded in any other way than as an honor?
It's much more than an honor. It's a ticket to a job.
So is anybody buying this? Are PhDs being abolished or disregarded?
No. The stranglehold has gotten even tighter over the years. It's become essentially like the MD - with much less justification. It's simply a barrier you have to climb over before you can make a career, and it's being imposed on more and more jobs. At even the smallest liberal arts college, nowadays, they say with pride, All of our faculty have PhDs. Many of the best teachers are thrown out because they don't have a PhD. It's a paper qualification that poisons the whole field.
What you're saying reminds me of a situation a couple of years ago when my colleague at GBN, Peter Schwartz, and I tried to do a book called Biofutures. When we started to research the future of biotechnology, we found an interesting contrast with the computer world. You can't get computer people to shut up about the future. They go on and on about it. In biotech we couldn't find anybody who would talk about the future.
There are a couple of interesting components to this. First is the government regulation you speak of, which has good reason for being in place because of the life-critical issues, deep cultural issues, and so on. The result is, of course, that when any of the researchers start talking out of school, saying, Well, maybe we'll cure death, that's it - they don't get the money, because they're obviously irresponsible.
The second component of this idea brings me on to your point about PhDs. Because of the whole realm of government permissions and grants surrounding biotech, it's attracting more PhD types and fewer amateur types, whereas computer technology tremendously enables amateurs.
What also strikes me is that the culture we see here [at the PC Forum, the annual computer conference run by Dyson's daughter Esther] is far friendlier to women than the academic world I come from; it's largely because you don't have to have a PhD. You don't even have to have an MBA to run a company. Many of these women,
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm [house.gov] " In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. ... The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
A small percentage of gifted technical people have the interest or the aptitude to become good managers. One way to get a PHB is to promote your best tech guy into the manager job. One way to be a good manager is to "know what you don't know." That means that you leave the tech stuff to the tech guys and focus on managing. This is where a lot of new managers (with tech backgrounds) screw up. They figure that the reason they got the job was that they were the smartest tech guy, so they should make all of the tech decisions. The way to avoid this is to have a high ratio of tech guys to managers, so that the managers are too busy managing to dive into the tech details.
With that said, I've been a manager or a manager of managers for 15+ years and still occaisionally dive into the details. I only do it when (I think) I have something to contribute and the project is already fubar and requires an intervention. That doesn't mean that I don't routinely ask a lot of pointed technical questions to make sure the tech guys are using their pointy heads. But mostly I let the tech guys be tech guys.
We are all trained monkeys... monkeys trained to do specific tasks in exchange for food and other creature comforts. So, in that progression, a PHD is a better trained monkey, and deserves all the credit and honor that is deserved!
I'm not disciplined enough -- I'll take that time to continue finishing the work that's stressing me out the most. Or mentoring the employees I've been ignoring all week.
Is a problem.
It now means for a ever increasingly large percentage of fields, going into debt and not being assured a means of paying it back.
There simply is not enough jobs.
This is a problem, and I am not sure how it will be addressed.
It would seem even the medical field won't be immune for long...
In the next 10 years it is going to be increasingly possible for a doctor in Japan to diagnose and operate on a patient in Ohio for example.
The medical field kinda reminds me of where computers where in the early 1990's. Who can forget Yourdon's "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" ?
In that book he predicted a massive layoff trend as India and the Far east matured....exactly what is happening now, and we haven't seen ANYTHING yet.
In fact in many ways, if Yourdon could have predicted just how large of an impact the internet will have on job displacement in the technology and scientific fields...I think he is probably thinking too himself I underestimated the impact by several orders of magnitude.
There are just not enough jobs for everyone and it won't matter if you have a BS, MS, PhD or no degree at all.
I will say this. It is very important to network, and get out there and do! In this new era that is comming you will be judged privately by who you know and not just what you have done. Who you know is very important to eliminate the risk of employment for the few jobs there are.
Batton down the hatches and prepare to weather the worse as we are in the eye of the storm at the moment, sortof a silent calm before we emerge again in the storm that has been the past 3-4 years.
Don't give up, network and start a open source project!
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I suspect not many.
Derek
define "real world"
IAWTP!
While the rest of the world is busy helping out on the farm.
Ok so maybe its not a farm, but children of parents who are not rich - often end up working to help out the family.
What it takes to get a pHD is rich parents (and the discipline to limit keggers to weekends) - or even richer parents - in which case the keggers matter less.
AIK
What it takes to get a pHD is rich parents (and the discipline to limit keggers to weekends) - or even richer parents - in which case the keggers matter less
This is a load of crap. Do rich parents make it easier? Sure. Are they required? Of course not. I know plenty of people, myself included, who completed PhDs and definitely do NOT have rich parents.
This could just as easily be turned around to...
21 ways to be a good fasci -- I mean Conservative:
1.) You have to believe that the AIDS virus was not a disease but a cure - until it somehow got spread to heterosexual women who don't use drugs.
2.) You have to believe that a bare breast on TV is the height of evil but Jerry Springer is just good clean entertainment.
3.) You have to believe that guns in the hands of any American who plunks their $200 down are the only way to stop black people from shooting white
people.
4.) You have to believe that there is no art below a 7.6 Neilsen rating.
5.) You have to believe that global temperatures changes are far less important than 3rd quarter profits.
6.) You have to believe that a man would chose to have sex with another man without some pretty hefty homonal urging.
7.) You have to believe the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth.
8.) You have to believe that a rising gap between haves and have-nots has nothing to do with societal decay.
9.) You have to believe that nature is best apprecated through a 30x gun sight from the window of your Hummer.
10.) You have to believe that self-esteem is best expressed by stomping on someone with a lower income than yours.
11.) You have to believe that the military's ability to destroy the world 38.4 times over is needed to "defend your country".
12.) You have to believe that guns don't kill people - video games kill people.
13.) You have to believe that taxes are immoral when used to pay for education but essential when used to pay for stealth bombers.
14.) You have to believe that Ronald Reagan was the greatest American who ever lived, closely followed by Rush Limbaugh.
15.) You have to believe that if a kid in a slum was really all that smart, he'd match the standardised test scores of a kid from the most expensive private school in the country.
16.) You have to believe that George Dubya Bush has a brain.
17.) You have to believe that supply side economics has worked somewhere at some time.
18.) You have to believe that a Democrat getting his knob shined by an intern was a far worse breach of national trust than selling arms to Iran and using the revenue to fund the Contras.
19.) You have to believe that shooting doctors who perform abortions is justified by the commandment "thou shalt not kill.".
20.) You have to believe that funding of the Republican party by Enron was somehow in the best interest to the United States.
21.) You have to believe that the media is a vast Left Wing conspiracy (even though it's owned by powerful right wingers...)
The1Genius - Littera Scripta Manet
The plumber is the guy who makes more money than a CS PHD. But seriously, I disagree with your contention that configuring a W2k proxy server has nothing to do with CS. Unless your definition of CS excludes building something that actual works and has value.
(And as a caveat, my opinions are my own)
I can't go into detail, but I've met the people at google. They're fucking brilliant.
I'm not saying MS or anyone else is lacking, but google is intense for work, and intense for play.
It may seem haphazard, but it works well here.
At the end of the day though, PhD's have one advantage that most BS/MS's dont have: an intense study of the theoretical. I cant even come close to the banter of some people here, and I consider myself damn good at what I do.
While any opinion is valued and important, the PhD's here are to explain (very often) why a choice is a bad one, or why a thought is a good one.
Engineers are great, I'm one of them. But sometimes it takes someone who's read the papers to explain the reasons of existance, to what seems stupid to us.
PhD's dont justify the world, but it does indicate a specialization in your field, all things explored to date, and of course what you PhD'd in.
They add a perspective on reality that we dont oft see in other places. Fundamentally though the difference is this:
MS is not the bleeding edge. It's a pulled back version, and for good reasons. They adopt technology that fits well for consumer OS's and servers.
The goal at google is to do the best they can at their mission statement (roughly) "make all information available, and useful, to everyone"
MS's is to make the best user experience for the vast majority. Both are noble goals, but both are VERY different.
We hire PhD's to make the best product to deliver on our goals. MS hires coders to make the best product to deliver on their goals.
I dont see this as criminal or wrong, at all.
My definition of CS excludes IT, actually. Config on a W2k proxy server utilizes the fruits of CS, but that's like saying driving a stick shift is employing mechanical engineering because you have to use the clutch and the shift lever. Using a CS graduate to configure a fucking proxy is a waste of an education; it's like asking an electrical engineer to set up your VCR.
CS - Coding is on the boundary; architecture and algorithms are the core.
And the plumber makes more money than the CS PHD in *what* fucking world? CS PHDs tend to make at least 80k for a 40 hour work week, at least in my neck of the corporate woods. That's entry. A journeyman plumber working 40 hours a week doesn't make anywhere near 80k. Yes, the PHD put in more schooling; on the other hand, the journeyman probably doesn't own his own company, and will make significantly less as a result. If he does own his own company, he's got upkeep on tools and shit like that.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
[flash forward]
Word of the team's success buzzed through the computer industry with extraordinary speed. Within days the Business Week article found its way to the highest office in IBM, prompting a scathing memo from company president Thomas Watson:
Last week Control Data had a press conference during which they officially announced their 6600 system. I understand that in the laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people, including the janitor. Of these 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D., a relatively junior programmer. Constrasting this modest effort with our own vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer.
[flash back]
As soon as they arrived at the new facility, the crew began to realize just how detached they were. After ambling through the building's tiny lobby and sitting down in their labs every morning, they suddenly realized that they had no interruptions. It was a strange sensation, somewhat like sitting next to a piece of humming machinery for days on end, then having someone turn it off. The newfound peace was striking.
The advantages were even greater for Cray. He had a beautiful Praire-style home built on the sixty-five-acre site, only a couple hundred yards from the new facility. Cray design the home himself, and it was an extraordinary piece of construction -- no one in Chippewa had ever seen anything quite like it. From the outset Cray had considered what he would need in the event of a nuclear blast, and had designed the lower level of the home as a fallout shelter. Joists in the spacious first floor were made from cold rolled steel, then topped with four-inch-thick concrete slab. Block walls in the basement were also filled with concrete; doors between lower level rooms were fireproof. A six-foot-deep pool in the basement doubled as a potential source of potable water and ten-thousand-gallon underground tank held enough oil to last through four winters. Construction workers were in awe of the building, saying that the basement contained more steel reinforcing than the new bank that was being built downtown. Cray also added his own inventive touch, designing an air-conditioning system that would spray water on the roof and cool the house through an evaporative process.
The best part for Cray, however, was the new home's proximity to the Chippewa lab. With the lab only about eight hundred feet away, he could work any hours he wanted. He simply shuttled back and forth by walking through the forest that separated the two buildings.
After Cray and the other engineers moved into the new facility, management intervention ground to a halt. Most of the corporate directors felt that it was too far to drive. Long-distance calling was considered more trouble than it was worth in 1962 because it required operator assistance...
To maintain privacy Cray set up strict rules regarding visitors: no sales calls, no management meetings, no visits of any kind without his permission. In the Wisconsin woods, the engineers had a pure, blissful, bare-bones isolation. No one -- not even Bill Norris -- could walk in without an appointment...
Despite the isolation, word of their impending success began to trickle out of Chippewa Falls. Something unusual was happening up there in the north woods of Wisconsin, and the rest of the industry wanted to know what it was. At the time -- mid-1963 -- the computer industry was so small that it was nearly impossible to keep secrets. Cray's self-imposed isolation slowed the normal buzz of information, but word still traveled quickly. Programmers at the Livermore lab were already anxious to buy the Chippewa crew's first machine. Word quickly spread to Los Alamos and to the National Security Agency in Washington. Everyone in the community, it seemed, had a problem that needed the speed of a CDC 6600.
In August 1963 Control Da
Seastead this.
I'm sure that you have earned the distinction - however - may I suggest fundamentally - that poor kids who get pHDs are noise in the data for a sound reason.
That education is an empirical luxury.
That poor societies are limited in the amount of life-hours they can devote to education - both for teacher hours and for student hours.
That the distribution of life-hours for education worldwide is closely correlated with the wealth of a society relative to its trading partners.
Therefore:
pHDS exists only where there is sufficient economic advantage given to a select group of people with respect to another group which are made to do the heavy lifting.
Under Malthusian economics - one group can be rich - only at the expense of another. And because education is an expression of relative wealth at either a personal level or an onclave level - those who are educated ARE in fact educated at the expense of the others.
This is but one reason which suggests the educated have a debt to honor with repect to the world at large - but I ramble.
None of this is to suggest having wealth or a pHD is morally wrong - but there is a degree of moral responsability attached to priveledge. In short Ann Rand and Emerson both had it wrong - we are not independant agents - Thomas More had it right - no man is an island. (I suggest)
AIK
Okay. I think I see why we are in disagreement. I think we are using the word "rich" differently.
I was using the usual definition of "rich", meaning having great wealth or a lot of disposable income. In this sense of the word, it's quite possible to get an advanced degree without being rich or having rich parents.
After reading your last post, I believe that you are using "rich" on the scale of a global economy. With this definition, I'd think that people who live at the poverty level in the very prosperous countries (with housing, running water, better medical care) to be richer than the average people in some extremely poor developing countries. Using this definition of "rich", I'd say that you have a valid point -- I'm sure that there are many people in economically depressed societies who cannot afford to spend the years required to obtain a secondary education, let alone a graduate education.
I think the factor that most compromises education is the single generation population expansion unadjusted for infant mortality. In short the total number of kids per adult.
Since only a fraction of adults can teach - that fraction must be divided among n number of children per available teacher. n is a factor which represents the average hours of teaching available per child. You can then allocate that as you like - but you cannot wish it away. Some will get more - other less.
As a thought experimenet - I would like to consider giving one child from every family the allocation required to go all the way to the top. This means a doctor is every pot - so to speak.
It is very fair. it is immune to historical prejudices - without being counterracial.
And it avoids the trap of welfare which is to perpetuate poverty by encouraging professionals to avoid children (by taxing them into stress) while encouraging overutilized parents to add more kids to a situation in which the kids are already self-parenting.
Social policy should strive to provide one parent for every child.
AIK
A hundred Ph.Ds and we have what from Google? A search engine. Pathetic... Just think of what these people could have done if dispersed over 10 companies working on 20 extremely innovative breakthrough products. And at Google they made a goddamn Javascript webmail and a calculator.
Compare that to Xerox Palo Alto labs mentioned in the article. I think that while Google may be a nice place to work, a hot stock and an overhyped company (do you know how many Internet users actually use Google or any other search engine for that matter? Let me tell you that it's a lot less than 100%), it is not a big innovator. Creating one product and incrementally improving it over time is not what I call very impressive. Any other tech company seems more important and more interesting to me - Sony, Microsoft, IBM or even nVidia - they matter much more than Google. Because they do a lot more.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.