, 3 min read
Why can´t you find a job with a Stanford computer science PhD?
To many of my older colleagues, the idea that you possibly couldn’t find a job with a good degree, let alone a PhD, is unthinkable. And what about a promising young graduate in Computer Science from Stanford University? What if he has a PhD? He may not be able to secure an academic job, but industry recruiters will be all over him (or her). Surely!
The truth is maybe harsher.
Chand John wrote a touching article recounting his personal experience. No doubt, he expected to easily land a good industry job. At least, that is what his professors expected. Yet it took him a year to get a job. He was dismissed by most employers:
Despite having programmed computers since age 8, I was rejected from about 20 programming jobs. (…) my experience writing code at a university, even on a product with 47,000 unique downloads, didn’t count as coding “experienceâ€.
There is a hidden assumption on campus that academic jobs are hard to get, but industry jobs are easy. Many computer science professors assume that they and their students could easily land a job at Google or any other tech company nearby. Along with this belief goes the fact that whatever happens on campus is years ahead, and much more sophisticated, than what industry does. The story goes like this: government funds professors who have the ideas, they get their students to develop these ideas… and eventually these ideas end up getting picked up by industry when students get industry jobs. The story goes back to Vannevar Bush.
There is a problem however: this story does not match the facts. Employers do not recruit graduate students to get access to the work they did on campus. When a graduate student is recruited, he will be very lucky if his new employer has more than a passing interest in what he did on campus. It is not just employer reluctance: very few students could take what they learned as a graduate student and launch a business or a consulting venture. The truth is that if you are fresh out of school, you will be the one doing most of the learning in industry. Even someone with a PhD can expect to be an apprentice for many years.
Also, let us be honest: the software produced on campus is rarely good. It is often made of untested, undocumented, and barely functioning prototypes. I have no doubt that Chand John wrote beautiful and maintainable software while at the university. However, I understand the skepticism of employers who hear “I wrote code as a student”. It is simply not a great reference. They hear “I wrote software for fun”.
So, people like Chand John end up with prize-winning research that is of little interest to anyone in industry. They wrote code on campus, but employers think “Oh! God! They will have to unlearn everything and start from scratch”. Is it any surprise that they are not offered the top programming jobs?
Of course, it is not entirely fair to say that Chand John couldn’t easily get an industry job. He does not tell us how selective he was. I am asked routinely by people from industry about clever graduate students. Presumably, what he couldn’t get easily is an interesting job. A job that would allow him to pay his student debts and offer him an intellectual challenge. These jobs are scarce, both in industry and in academia.
Update: It looks like Chand works for Honda Research in what must be a desirable position. Source: The idea for this post came to me from a G+ post by Suresh Venkatasubramanian.