Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Friday, June 11, 2004

Posted 8:10 AM by Anurag

Finally, some PhD advantage?

New York Times is reporting on how Google is reaping benefits of employing a huge number of PhDs. Feels good to hear that. I am waiting for a similar news-item in future about Management PhDs!

About google, before you forget, both google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were almost done with the PhDs when they quit and started google. :) Some neat (read funny) comments on the discussion from /. :

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BS = (obvious)
PHD = Piled Higher and Deeper
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PHD = Permanent Head Damage
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Someone told this story on Slashdot regarding over-qualification months (years?) ago...
Essentially, someone had a Ph.D but was looking for some sort of relatively menial but steady work so he could continue to eat. In order to avoid being thrown out for being over-qualified and therefore requiring more pay / risk of leaving for better work, he changed his resume to the still truthful:
Education
Diploma: Smalltown High School, 1975
Hobbies
B.S in Mechanical Engineering, Foo State University, 1979
M.S. in Physics, University of Bar, 1981
Ph.D. in Physics, University of Bar, 1984
He was hired, and told that his soon-to-be employer "approved of hobbies."
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On this page [google.com], they claim to have only 50 Pigeon Harvesting Dogs (PHDs). Now they're up to 700? Wow....
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Oxford doesn't give out PhDs. A doctorate from Oxford is a D.Phil (short for "Doctor of Philosophy"), in contrast to most other universities, which use the term PhD (Philosophiae Doctor, which is exactly the same thing in Latin).
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From Monster.com;
"Ph.D. a plus" returned: Jobs 1 to 50 of 399
"MCSE a plus" returned: Jobs 1 to 50 of 503
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From monster.com:
"Ph.D. a plus" average pay: $150,000 out of 399 jobs
"MCSE a plus" average pay: $32,000 out of 503 jobs
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PhDs are sort of a double-edged sword
guess it's a good thing to see someone hiring a lot of PhDs these days. Most people with PhDs in technical fields (especially the sciences) these days have a lot of trouble finding any kind of employment, because once someone sees that "PhD" on your resume and you're not applying for, say, thermodynamic research at GE or machine translation research at Google, they just toss it in a wastebasket.
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.
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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?
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PhDs are supposedly experts: somebody who knows more and more about less and less until they eventually know everything there is to know about nothing.

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