Microsoft's JobsBlog

I completely agree with a lot of the points made in Eric Sink’s "The hazards of hiring" article, but being a PhD myself (with no shrink-wrap experience), there’s a few points I’d like to raise.

Firstly, I’m glad that seeing a PhD only raises a yellow light in his eyes. All too often PhD’s are disregarded off-hand as over-qualified or “not having the right stuff”. It’s easy to see where this perception comes from – many of the PhD’s I know did their research in a highly theoretical topic and just don’t use this knowledge any more. There’s a real shame here that a lot of good ideas discovered (and proven to work) never make it from the thesis to product, although Microsoft is certainly one of the better companies encouraging this.

However, what I find is that PhD’s often possess some skills that few non-PhD’s have, notably the ability to come up with new ideas (my advisor saying “original contribution to knowledge” keeps echoing round my head!), and in contrast to never believe that they are the first to think about something, so reuse, reuse, reuse. These are important in either the shrink-wrap or non-shrink-wrap industry to push the state-of-the-art forward and not to reinvent the wheel. Actually my belief is that genuinely new ideas are extremely rare; most are just new combinations or repositioning of old ideas. Ignoring the other PhD “qualities” (attention to detail, scientific process, seeing things through to the end, etc, etc), these are skills that *any* company can benefit from.

Finally I don’t understand this concept of “shrink-wrap is different”. Is it the only industry that is under deadlines? …have to consider tradeoffs? …market share? …have customers to answer to? …need to ship bug-free products? The only think that I can possibly think of is number of potential users, but even then some non-shrink wrap (bespoke) software eclipses all but the largest shrink-wrap products – web software is just one that springs to mind. If you have any ideas answers on a postcard please :)

Sorry, rant over ;)

Thanks for the mention!
While I don't have a PhD, my 3 grad degrees are serving me well (sorry to be immodest).
My experience has been that PhDs do well in Lab (R&D) settings like IBM's Watson Center, where I had spent a few years.
In commercial development (e.g. financial services or manufacturing or retail), the solutions that are sought are different - mainly the innovative fusion of two or more "old ideas".

What is are 10X coders?

KidD - I'm not sure. You may want to check out Eric's blog (the link is at the bottom of the article) and ask him that question.

gretchen, KidD - I think the "10X coders" is a reference to the widely quoted statistic that some coders can be up to ten times as productive as the average coder. Unfortunately I can't give a reference as I don't have the relevant books to hand. I expect it's quoted in either "The Mythical Man-Month" or "Rapid Development" - maybe both - but I don't know the original source.

was that '10X' or the 80/20 (Pareto) rule - where 20% of codes do 80% of actual development?
:-)