Xref: utzoo comp.software-eng:400 misc.jobs.misc:1534 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ukma!rutgers!im4u!ut-sally!utah-cs!defun.utah.edu!shebs From: shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng,misc.jobs.misc Subject: Re: American Programmer (What's a Ph.D. worth?) Message-ID: <5388@utah-cs.UUCP> Date: 3 Apr 88 02:48:45 GMT References: <555@psu-cs.UUCP> <1434@ur-tut.UUCP> <3415@bunker.UUCP> <3326@zeus.TEK.COM> <461@vsi.UUCP> <5775@bunny.UUCP> <2218@ttidca.TTI.COM> Sender: news@utah-cs.UUCP Reply-To: shebs%defun.utah.edu.UUCP@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs) Organization: PASS Research Group Lines: 31 In article <2218@ttidca.TTI.COM> hollombe@ttidcb.tti.com (The Polymath) writes: > Positions nationally. Fees paid by em- > ployers. U.S. citizens or permanent res- > idents. PhD or minimum three years, <== Note > experience. Call or write ... [etc.] > >Of course, that's just one recruiter's opinion. Makes you wonder, though. Based on my recent experience in jobhunting, equating a PhD with however many years it took you to get it is quite common. Based on observation of PhDs in industry, if you take a job where they think that way, you will deserve whatever you get, which generally means almost zero creative work. The main use of your degree will be to pad proposals ("we're going to have 45 PhD researchers working on this project, if you give us the bucks"). Personally, I've sweated over my PhD too much to have it counted the same as warming a chair for five years. >My experience has been that CS degrees and CS competence are not closely >related. s/CS//g - this isn't some special defect of CS degrees. A while back I read some flame in an IEEE rag about how EE grads don't know the right things, and my dad the non-degreed (not even BS) research chemist has told some amusing stories about the ignorance of new chemistry PhDs. A degree is more like some minimum requirement than a glowing recommendation. If you can't manage to get a BS these days, you've got to be really defective somehow, like maybe you can't tear yourself away from a terminal long enough to find out that bubble sorts aren't the only choice! (flames launched, sir - tracking...) stan shebs shebs@cs.utah.edu