I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish. Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I think it was a bullet I dodged. Having to look for research position at a company or getting stuck fighting for tenure position at some even less than average school in the middle of nowhere would not have worked out as well.
And funny enough, I looked at the list of faculty at the university I was at, to see where they came from. All from high end school Harvard, Purdue, Cornell etc, just like the article mentions.
The policy it seems is hire up, graduate down. Unless of course they are in the top university then they hire from peers.
I applied for a PhD at an average school, passed the qualifying exam. But after a couple years found a full time programming job and didn't finish. Looking back family and friends were upset at me for not finishing, but I think it was a bullet I dodged
This is me, right now, except in English: I'm a technical writing consultant (www.seliger.com if you're curious) and I feel terrible for my peers who are trying to make it in academia. The problem is bad enough that I wrote this: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor....
Intellectually I know that I should've finished the dissertation, for the letters, but I stopped caring.
Maybe, I am in a position to interview a lot of candidates and all the ones with PhDs applying for general software engineer positions are pretty bad at software. Some fail the fizzbuzz test even. They have been working on their research project for 4 years and in that time forgot all most of the things they learned in undergraduate. Some of the ones that passed the interview were asking for much higher salaries, which we could not justify.
As someone who will be graduating in less than a year of PhD in comp sci., I would like to encourage you to not give up on all PhDs with such assumption. Like you, I am not impressed with the prospect of academia and research in general. But I honestly don't think a majority of CS phd students at decent (top 50) universities will fail fizzbuzz test as long as they have had undergraduate CS background. Some of us may fail to implement BFS/DFS/merge/quicksort during a 45 minute interview, but I think this is due to the interviewing process for tech jobs being somewhat broken (I saw my peers studying 3 or more months with interview prep books/sites and thought it's becoming ridiculous). A much better way to test a candidate would be to assign him/her a take-home assignment/project and let him/her work on it independently or along with your team, and judge his/her candidacy based on it (if your company can afford the extra time/resource for such process). I'm sure you'll notice those PhD folks from CS would not be as bad as you think they are.
In any case, I'd (for selfish reason) encourage you to be open-minded and give applicants with PhD background at least an equal chance. Personally, I never wanted a PhD, but I went for it because I needed to keep my immigrant status legal, and I couldn't pay for a master's degree out of pocket (if I enroll for a PhD program, I get a master's degree for free on the way). The downside of being a PhD student is that it is significantly more difficult for me to find my way back into software positions, which is something I wanted to do eventually; the HR usually throws away my resume with the assumption(s) that I am either only interested in research or am "overqualified" (or that I'd ask for more money), all of which are incorrect for a lot of PhD students, like me, stuck in academia for now. For all HR or recruiters reading this, I'd encourage you all to give PhD students a fair shot for the programming positions at your firms. You might find that these PhD students are more motivated or have more persistence/endurance (as most who survive the PhD experience usually have) or if you're lucky, are better prepared and thoughtful programmers.
Why is failing to implement BFS/DFS/quicksort in a 45 minute interview the fault of the interviewing process being broken?
The idea that someone has to study 3 months for an interview is ridiculous. I suppose for a PhD student I can understand as they probably need to refresh their memory, but if that's the case then you could argue they shouldn't be passing the interviews without refreshing their memory if we are talking about normal software development roles.
I did the same. Bailed out in the middle of my science Phd to programming. Most of my peers who finished their degrees are asking me how to jump into the field.
And funny enough, I looked at the list of faculty at the university I was at, to see where they came from. All from high end school Harvard, Purdue, Cornell etc, just like the article mentions.
The policy it seems is hire up, graduate down. Unless of course they are in the top university then they hire from peers.