[rbartelme]

> Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD.

I often equate my Ph.D. with the ability to teach myself how to do things. Ex. going from a wet/dry lab biologist with zero experience in C-style languages, to learning Arduino's flavor of Cpp and the PID control library to run process controls for your wet lab biology experiment.

[hiptobecubic]

That makes it sound like a pretty terrible value, honestly. That kind of "fake it till you make it" plunging into new domains is something people often learn without spending 6 years fighting academia. In fact, your exact example is the kind of project you'd buy for e.g. a teen that likes computers.

I still the think the main value of a PhD is learning to wade through adversarial bullshit and bureaucracy and actually deliver something unless your career overlaps heavily with your research.