[ModernMech]

I don't know about Google, but I've heard of this happening during other acquisitions. A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in CS worked at a startup that was just acquired. He was responsible for the a lot of the tech in the platform they were acquiring, yet since he didn't pass their algorithms heavy interview they didn't want to hire him. He ended up working for one of the other companies interested in buying the startup.

[ryanSrich]

Lol wut? This can't be serious. Can you please name this company so everyone can avoid them?

[anon_123]

Snapchat does this when they try to acquire companies.

[aswanson]

Hilarious. We've reached a place where a doctorate in CS is an insufficient qualification to delete a fucking file.

[slackoverflower]

I have heard that Facebook also has a rigorous screening process for acquihires too, and people get sent away althought with a generous severance package.

[ben_jones]

IMO the pendulum swings both ways. I'd bet money many a PHD could not delete a file properly.

[kchoudhu]

This is such a toxic attitude.

The industry complains about being unable to find enough programming talent, while dismissing entire swathes of highly trained, highly educated people for investing in themselves.

[jshevek]

From what I've seen, people with PhDs in CS are less competent as devs than devs without PhDs.

[plinkplonk]

What a PhD in CS teaches you is how to do research in CS. This skill may or may not be valuable for a specific company and may or may not intersect with raw dev chops. Production Dev is a distinct skill from CS research.

[asabjorn]

That doesn't make sense at all. I do not see why a PhD would disproportionally filter out people with talent for coding, so that the graduates even after years of industry experience afterwards would still be unable to be great at coding.

[dmritard96]

the assumption here is that people can only learn at adequately fast rates before earning their phd? aka, isnt the expectation that if you can earn a phd in at least a highly related industry you should be able to pick up just about anything. Are they going to know how to wrangle a huge dev ops stack into submission, or pump data through some realtime frame work to maximize throughput or setup paxos properly from day 0, fine. but neither does any other entry level engineer and these guys can either learn it or be placed on a different team within the company that does deeper research that would make use of their phd...

[yitchelle]

Horses for courses. If you to do R&D, go with PhDs, if you want D&D, go with devs.

[ModernMech]

I'll just say it starts with a "P" and ends in "interest"

[spotman]

Google does this too. There is exceptions but they are rare.