[redbad]

    > it's incredibly hard to find a good engineer that knows 
    > his stuff. They generally have PhDs and years of 
    > training in math and whatever particular field they work 
    > on. If you get one that is actually doing novel 
    > algorithm development, each one is a golden goose that 
    > will bring in revenue for the company for years to come.

Like ritchiea, I admit I don't have a huge breadth of experience, but I've worked with enough PhDs to say with confidence that, more often than not, they represent a net negative contribution to an engineering team. Novel algorithms aren't useful if they can't run in production, and the PhD's I've known, with one or two exceptions, lacked both the ability and desire to produce production-quality code. I grew to deeply resent those "engineers" who would read papers for half the day, make buggy commits to prototype repos that never got released, and refuse requests from both peers and managers alike to contribute to the team's extant backlogs.

[blah32497]

Sounds like a CS PhD! hahaha (maybe Math?) I want to preface by saying that for most work that goes on in Silicon Valley a PhD adds nothing.

I know what you're talking about.

However outside of SV there are a lot of places where that's simply not the case. What you have is basically a cross disciplinary collaboration where you just don't have the educational background nor the expertise to do the engineering yourself.

The resentment your describing is really the same resentment you can feel towards your boss -"All he does is tell us what to do. He's not in the trenches like us!" - and it's directly related to the amount of mutual respect. In essence, how hard do you feel the other person is working relative to you.

Your description of your coworkers seems to indicate that you didn't feel like they're pulling their weight, and that's definitely a big problem.

I've heard second hand that in the valley there are a lot of incompetent PhDs that use their educational background as leverage to slack off. People will often hire graduates solely based on a degree thinking that if someone has a Math PhD "they're smart, they can learn on the job, and they'll contribute in some magical way just by being there". But actually these guys have just spent 5 years in poverty getting an advanced degree and don't want to be a code monkeys with a bunch of fresh out of college 21 year-olds. And, oh yeah - reality check, no one cares about their degree in abstract algebra.

9/10 of these PhDs are crappy engineers and 9/10 times they are thrown at problems they don't really have a background in (so they can't even be crappy and regurgitate equations they're memorized).