[robomartin]

> You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.

Not necessarily true. I have been there many times. We did not need PhD's to solve the problems.

One thing people might fail to understand is that there are professionals who not only invest the proverbial 10,000 hours to become experts in a field but go way beyond that and live and breathe the stuff for decades.

I don't want to sound like I am hating on PhD's. I am not. Just saying that they might just lack the marketing value some assign to the degree, that's all. You don't need N years of torture at a university to become an expert on something at the bleeding edge. In fact, in some cases this is almost impossible because the resources and "rules of engagement" in a university research context are very different from that of a business environment where your competitors are trying to eat your lunch every day and you have to perform or die.

You are absolutely correct in saying that certain industries favor having PhD's on the roster.

Here's what's interesting about that. We have done a range of aerospace projects for DARPA-related work. What happens more often than not is that the PhD's go get the funding and then discover they can't build it. That's when they shovel money our way to actually make it happen. I don't have a single PhD on staff. We get shit done. No matter how complex. From industrial products to sending hardware to the Space Station and (hopefully soon) the moon, 'been there, done that.