[jldugger]

I don't find it surprising at all, sadly. After a reorg, one of my colleagues on a different team (largely Master's degrees in ML) told our new team member: 'You shouldn't be worried, being assigned to their team is an honor. They're hardest to get into -- it's full of people who didn't just skip all the hard courses.'

In many ways, hiring advanced degree holders is a crapshoot. They have skills you probably can't train, but often times come in with fewer software development skills than your undergrad intern, despite theoretically having more years of experience. You don't need to know git to publish in IEEE, or write unit tests or readable code, or debug an edge case, and your only code reviewer is a professor who doesn't care about this either. 'Good enough to publish' is a far cry from 'customers will pay for it.'